Access Methods for Intervals

Intervals provide a compact way to represent the duration of a property. They appear in many database applications, including spatial, temporal [Jensen and Snodgrass, 1999], constraint [Bertino et al., 1997; Ramaswamy, 1997] and object-oriented databases [Kanellakis et al., 1993]. Due to their importance, many techniques have been proposed in literature for indexing intervals. Here we concentrate on the 1-dimensional dynamic interval management problem and in particular the so-called stabbing query. We first present classical main-memory solutions to the stabbing query, namely: the Interval Tree, the Segment Tree and the Priority Search Tree. These structures have been extended in various ways to support intervals in external memory (i.e., on the disk). Among other structures in this chapter we discuss: the Segment R-tree, the External Segment Tree, the External Priority Search Tree, the Metablock Tree, the External Memory Interval Tree, the Binary-Blocked Interval Tree and the Time-Polygon Index.

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