Techniques are described herein for accurately estimating the cost of performing a join against “mirror format” data that is at least partially located in volatile memory. Mirror format data is a copy of on-disk data (a.k.a. persistent format data) stored in a different format in volatile memory. In the preferred embodiment described herein, the mirror format data is stored in a column-major format, while the persistent format data is stored in a row-major format. The cost of performing a join query with a particular join method against mirror format data is different than the cost of performing the same particular join method against persistent format data. Techniques described herein for estimating the cost of multiple join query execution plans, and selecting the most optimized plan.