Techniques are described to evaluate an operation from an execution plan of a query to offload the operation to another database management system for less costly execution. In an embodiment, the execution plan is determined based on characteristics of the database management system that received the query for execution. One or more operations in the execution plan are then evaluated for offloading to another heterogeneous database management system. In a related embodiment, the offloading cost for each operation may also include communication cost between the database management systems. The operations that are estimated to be less costly to execute on the other database management system are then identified for offloading to the other database management system. In an alternative embodiment, the database management system generates permutations of execution plans for the same query, and similarly evaluates each permutation of the execution plans for offloading its one or more operations. Based on the total cost of each permutation, which may include offloading cost for one or more operations to another database management system, the least costly plan is selected for the query execution.