Efficient Execution of Range Mosaic Queries

A range mosaic query returns distribution of data within the query region as a pattern of mosaic, whereas a range aggregate query returns a single aggregate value of data within the query region. The range mosaic query divides a query region by a multi-dimensional grid, and calculates aggregate values of grid cells. In this paper, we propose a new type of query, range mosaic query and a new operator, mosaic-by, with which the range mosaic queries can be represented. In addition, we suggest efficient algorithms for processing range mosaic queries using an aggregate R-tree. The algorithm that we present computes aggregate results of every mosaic grid cell by one time traversal of the aggregate R-tree, and efficiently executes the queries with only a small number of node accesses by using the aggregate values of the aggregate R-tree. Our experimental study shows that the range mosaic query algorithm is reliable in terms of performance for several synthetic datasets and a real-world dataset.