Indexing Techniques For Object Oriented Databases

Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of new database applications such as CAD/CAM systems, spatial information systems, and multimedia information systems. The needs of these applications are far more complex than traditional business applications. They call for support of objects with complex data types, such as images and spatial objects, and for support of objects with wildly varying numbers of index terms, such as documents. Traditional indexing techniques such as the B-tree and its variants do not efficiently support these applications, and so new indexing mechanisms have been developed. As a result of the demand for database support for new applications, there has been a proliferation of new indexing techniques. The need for a book addressing indexing problems in advanced applications is evident. For practitioners and database and application developers, this book explains best practice, guiding the selection of appropriate indexes for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more robust indexes. For newcomers, this book is an overview of the wide range of advanced indexing techniques. Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on indexing techniques, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Index Data Structures in Object-Oriented Databases

Object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS) are used to imple ment and maintain large object databases on persistent storage. Regardless whether the underlying database model follows the object-oriented, the rela tional or the object-relational paradigm, a key feature of any DBMS product is content based access to data sets. On the one hand this feature provides user-friendly query interfaces based on predicates to describe the desired data. On the other hand it poses challenging questions regarding DBMS design and implementation as well as the application development process on top of the DBMS. The reason for the latter is that the actual query performance depends on a technically meaningful use of access support mechanisms. In particular, if chosen and applied properly, such a mechanism speeds up the execution of predicate based queries. In the object-oriented world, such queries may involve arbitrarily complex terms referring to inheritance hierarchies and aggregation paths. These features are attractive at the application level, however, they increase the complexity of appropriate access support mechanisms which are known to be technically non-trivial in the relational world.

Indexing Techniques for Object-oriented Databases