Spatial Indexing on Flash-Based Solid State Drives

The use of a spatial index is fundamental to process spatial queries on spatial database systems. With the growing use of flash-based Solid State Drives (SSDs), designing spatial indices for these storage devices has gained increasing attention. Hence, while there are spatial indices dedicated to magnetic disks (i.e., disk-based spatial indices), the literature has focused on to propose flash-aware spatial indices that consider the intrinsic characteristics of SSDs, such as the asymmetric costs of reads and writes. However, the research to date has not been able to establish a flash-aware spatial index that actually exploits all the benefits of SSDs. The principal goal of this PhD work is to propose an efficient flash-aware spatial indexing method by taking into account the system implications introduced by SSDs. The main preliminary result of this PhD is eFIND, a generic framework that transforms a disk-based spatial index into an efficient flash-aware spatial index. Performance tests showed that, compared to the state of the art, eFIND improved the construction of spatial indices from 60% to 77%, and the spatial query processing from 22% to 23%.