A new algorithm is proposed in this paper which efficiently performs join in the temporal database. The main idea is to sort the smaller relation and to partition the larger relation, and the proposed algorithm reduces the cost of sorting the larger relation. To show the usefulness of the algorithm, the cost is analyzed with respect to the number of accesses to secondary storage and compared with that of Sort-Merge algorithm. Through the comparisons, we present and verify the conditions under which the proposed algorithm always outperforms the Sort-Merge algorithm. The comparisons show that the proposed algorithm achieves 10∼30% gain under those conditions.