Modern database applications including computer-aided design, multimedia information systems, medical imaging, molecular biology, or geographical information systems impose new requirements on the effective and efficient management of spatial data. Particular problems arise from the need of high resolutions for large spatial objects and from the design goal to use general purpose database management systems in order to guarantee industrial-strength. In the past two decades, various stand-alone spatial index structures have been proposed but their integration into fully-fledged database systems is problematic. Most of these approaches are based on the decomposition of spatial objects leading to replicating index structures. In contrast to common black-and-white decompositions which suffer from the lack of intermediate solutions, we introduce gray intervals which are stored in a spatial index. Additionally, we store the exact information of these gray intervals in a compressed way. Thes...