In order to improve the performance of the query optimization for the distribute database, an improved query optimization algorithm was proposed based on the genetic algorithm. The query execution cost model based on the genetic algorithm was proposed in this paper. The distributed database was emerged in the 70's of the last century and developed with the progress of the computer technology and network technology, the distributed database was the database system which is distributed storage dispersedly in physics and with centralized processing in mathematic logic. Because the storage points were not uniform, the structure of the distributed database is much more complicated than the centralized database. Both the genetic algorithm and the dynamic exhaustive planning algorithm were taken in the query simulation for the performance comparison. The result shows that the genetic query optimization method in this paper has better performance in the distributed database query application. The case study and the simulation result show that the algorithm can get a satisfactory optimization result in a few iterations and the query optimization algorithm based on the genetic method has nice performance of the query optimization property, and the consumption and costs of the query is reduced to the minimum. The method which this paper proposed has good application performance and is valuable to put into practice.