Performance Evaluation of Parallel S-Trees

The S-tree is a dynamic height-balanced tree similar in structure to B+trees. S-trees store fixed length bit-strings, which are called signatures. Signatures are used for indexing textbases, relational, object oriented and extensible databases as well as in data mining. In this article, methods of designing multi-disk B-trees are adapted to S-trees and new methods of parallelizing S-trees are developed. The resulting structures aim at achieving performance gain by accessing two or more disks simultaneously. In addition, two different searching techniques that exploit parallel disk accessing are devised. Performance results of experiments based on the new structures and searching techniques are also presented and discussed.