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 the point query (find all objects that contain a given search point) and the region query (find all objects that overlap a given search region). More

We show how to index mobile objects in one and two dimensions using efficient dynamic external memory data structures. The problem is motivated by real life applications in traffic monitoring, intelligent navigation and mobile communications domains. For the 1-dimensional case, we give (i) a dynamic, external memory algorithm with guaranteed worst case performance and linear space and (ii) a practical approximation algorithm also in the dynamic, external memory setting, which has linear space and expected logarithmic query time. We also give an algorithm with guaranteed logarithmic query time for a restricted version of the problem. We present extensions of our techniques to two dimensions. In addition we give a lower bound on the number of I/O's needed to answer the d-dimensional problem. Initial experimental results and comparisons to traditional indexing approaches are also included. 1 Introduction Traditional database management systems assume that data stored in the database rem...

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We examine I O-efficient data structures that provide indexing support for new data models. The database languages of these models include concepts from constraint programming (e.g., relational tuples are generated to conjunctions of constraints) and from object-oriented programming (e.g., objects are organized in class hierarchies). Let n be the size of the database, c the number of classes, B the page size on secondary storage, and t the size of the output of a query: (1) Indexing by one attribute in many constraint data models is equivalent to external dynamic interval management, which is a special case of external dynamic two-dimensional range searching. We present a semi-dynamic data structure for this problem that has worst-case space O(n B) pages, query I O time O(logB n+t B) and O(logB n+(logB n) 2 B) amortized insert I O time. Note that, for the static version of this problem, this is the first worst-case optimal solution. (2) Indexing by one attribute and by class name in an object-oriented model, where objects are organized

We introduce a new text-indexing data structure, the String B-Tree, that can be seen as a link between some traditional external-memory and string-matching data structures. In a short phrase, it is a combination of B-trees and Patricia tries for internal-node indices that is made more effective by adding extra pointers to speed up search and update operations. Consequently, the String B-Tree overcomes the theoretical limitations of inverted files, B-trees, prefix B-trees, suffix arrays, compacted tries and suffix trees. String B-trees have the same worst-case performance as B-trees but they manage unbounded-length strings and perform much more powerful search operations such as the ones supported by suffix trees. String B-trees are also effective in main memory (RAM model) because they improve the online suffix tree search on a dynamic set of strings. They also can be successfully applied to database indexing and software duplication.

Databases are increasingly being used to store multi-media objects such as maps, images, audio and video. Storage and retrieval of these objects is accomplished using multi-dimensional index structures such as R*-trees and SS-trees. As dimensionality increases, query performance in these index structures degrades. This phenomenon, generally referred to as the dimensionality curse, can be circumvented by reducing the dimensionality of the data. Such a reduction is however accompanied by a loss of precision of query results. Current techniques such as QBIC use SVD transform-based dimensionality reduction to ensure high query precision. The drawback of this approach is that SVD is expensive to compute, and therefore not readily applicable to dynamic databases. In this paper, we propose novel techniques for performing SVD-based dimensionality reduction in dynamic databases. When the data distribution changes considerably so as to degrade query precision, we recompute the SVD transform a...

We present a space- and I/O-optimal external-memory data structure for answering stabbing queries on a set of dynamically maintained intervals. Our data structure settles an open problem in databases and I/O algorithms by providing the first optimal external-memory solution to the dynamic interval management problem, which is a special case of 2-dimensional range searching and a central problem for object-oriented and temporal databases and for constraint logic programming. Our data structure simultaneously uses optimal linear space (that is, O(N/B) blocks of disk space) and achieves the optimal O(log B N + T/B) I/O query bound and O(log B N ) I/O update bound, where B is the I/O block size and T the number of elements in the answer to a query. Our structure is also the first optimal external data structure for a 2-dimensional range searching problem that has worst-case as opposed to amortized update bounds. Part of the data structure uses a novel balancing technique for efficient worst-case manipulation of balanced trees, which is of independent interest.

In many massive dataset applications the data must be stored in space and query efficient data structures on external storage devices. Often the data needs to be changed dynamically. In this chapter we discuss recent advances in the development of provably worst-case efficient external memory dynamic data structures. We also briefly discuss some of the most popular external data structures used in practice.

Lars Arge Vasilis Samoladas y Jeffrey Scott Vitter z Abstract In this paper we settle several longstanding open problems in theory of indexability and external orthogonal range searching. In the first part of the paper, we apply the theory of indexability to the problem of two-dimensional range searching. We show that the special case of 3-sided querying can be solved with constant redundancy and access overhead. From this, we derive indexing schemes for general 4-sided range queries that exhibit an optimal tradeoff between redundancy and access overhead.

In this paper we give I/O-optimal techniques for the extraction of isosurfaces from volumetric data, by a novel application of the I/Ooptimal interval tree of Arge and Vitter. The main idea is to preprocess the dataset once and for all to build an efficient search structure in disk, and then each time we want to extract an isosurface, we perform an output-sensitive query on the search structure to retrieve only those active cells that are intersected by the isosurface. During the query operation, only two blocks of main memory space are needed, and only those active cells are brought into the main memory, plus some negligible overhead of disk accesses. This implies that we can efficiently visualize very large datasets on workstations with just enough main memory to hold the isosurfaces themselves. The implementation is delicate but not complicated. We give the first implementation of the I/O-optimal interval tree, and also implement our methods as an I/O filter for Vtk's isosurface ext...