Systems, methods, and articles of manufacture for improving the efficiency of executing a query are provided. Queries frequently issued in a primary processing environment (e.g., a primary logical partition) may be run in a background processing environment (e.g., a background logical partition) with different access plans to determine the access plan that results in the least execution time. For some embodiments, in an effort to avoid executing queries that may have an adverse system-wide impact, selected queries may be analyzed in the background processing environment prior to being executed. This analysis may be performed to ensure the execution time of the query will not exceed a specified threshold, and/or will not result in excessive contention when executed in the primary processing environment.