Multidimensional Access Methods

Search operations in databases require some special support at the physical level. This is true for conventional databases as well as for spatial databases, where typical search operations include the point query  nd all objects that contain a givensearch point and the region query  nd all objects that overlap a given search region. More than ten years of spatial database research have resulted in a great variety of multidimensionalaccess methods to support such operations. This paper gives an overview of that work. After a brief survey of spatial data management in general, we rst present the class of point access methods, which are used to search sets of points in two or more dimensions. The second part of the paper is devoted to spatial access methods to handle extended objects, such as rectangles or polyhedra. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and experimental results concerning the relative performance of various approaches.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: CSUR
• Authors: Volker Gaede, Oliver Günther
• Keywords: Access Methods, CSUR 1998, Search Operations, Spatial Database