The performance of a distributed database system depends particularly on the site-allocation of the fragments. Queries access different fragments among the sites, and an originating site exists for each query. A data allocation algorithm should distribute the fragments to minimize the transfer and settlement costs of executing the query plans. The primary cost for a data allocation algorithm is the cost of the data transmission across the network. The data allocation problem in a distributed database is NP-complete, and scalable evolutionary algorithms were developed to minimize the execution costs of the query plans. In this paper, quadratic assignment problem heuristics were designed and implemented for the data allocation problem. The proposed algorithms find near-optimal solutions for the data allocation problem. In addition to the fast ant colony, robust tabu search, and genetic algorithm solutions to this problem, we propose a fast and scalable hybrid genetic multi-start tabu search algorithm that outperforms the other well-known heuristics in terms of execution time and solution quality.