Multidimensional access methods

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Abstract
Search operations in databases require special support at the physical level. This is true for conventional databases as well as spatial databases, where typical search operations include thepoint query(find all objects that contain a given search point) and theregion query(find all objects that overlap a given search region). More than ten years of spatial database research have resulted in a great variety of multidimensional access methods to support such operations. We give an overview of that work. After a brief survey of spatial data management in general, we first present the class ofpoint access methods, which are used to search sets of points in two or more dimensions. The second part of the paper is devoted tospatial access methodsto 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.

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