Techniques are described herein for building a framework for declarative query compilation using both rule-based and cost-based approaches for database management. The framework involves constructing and using: a set of rule-based properties tables that contain optimization parameters for both logical and physical optimization, a recursive algorithm to form candidate physical query plans that is based on the rule based tables, and a cost model for estimating the cost of a generated physical query plan that is used with the rule based properties tables to prune inferior query plans.