Abstract: Multi-way join is one of the most common data analysis operations, and MapReduce programming model that has been widely used to process large scale data sets has brought new challenges to multi-way join optimization. Traditional optimization approaches cannot be simply adapted to fit MapReduce feature, so there is still optimization room for MapReduce join algorithm. As to the former, we think I/O is the main cost of join. This paper first proposes an I/O cost based heuristic algorithm to initially determine a join sequence, and conducts further optimization. After the optimization, we also design a parallel execution algorithm to improve the whole performance of multi-way join. As to the latter, we think load balancing can effectively decrease the “buckets effect” of MapReduce. This paper proposes a fair task load allocation algorithm to improve the intra-join parallelism, and also analyzes the method to decide the appropriate number of Reduce tasks. Experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed optimization approaches. This study contributes to multi-way join applications in big data environment, such as the star-join in OLAP and the chain-join in social network.