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Methods, systems and computer products perform cost estimate to determine an efficient approach to answer a query according to one of several unified query plans. One unified query plan involves querying an unstructured database, referencing a unified index, and probing a structured database based on matches discovered in the unified index. The results of the unstructured database query are used to lookup entries in a unified index associated with the structured database. Then the structured database is probed by querying only the subset of the structured database gleaned from the unstructured database query.