Design and evaluation of access method for multi-dimensional objects in spatial databases

Abstract

The existing conventional access methods are not suitable to many complex applications such as geographic information systems, computer-aided design, and computer vision. Therefore, it is important to use a highly efficient access method for complex applications. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic access method, called Binary divided Region (BR) tree, for spatial data and then implement search, insertion, deletion, and splitting algorithms used for the BR tree. The proposed access method is compared with the two representative spatial access methods, R-tree and R +-tree, through performance results from analytical study and simulation approach for a VLSI data. For search, when the size of a user-specified rectangular region, called query window, is relatively small, BR tree produces the best performance with respect to the number of disk accesses since it generates the smallest number of nodes and avoids overlapping of rectangles. For insertion, BR tree achieves up to 20 percent saving in the amount of storage over R-tree and R +-tree since it does not need the values of coordinates in representing a region. Also, BR tree achieves up to 60 percent saving in insertion time over R-tree and R +-tree since it does not require the reorganization of tree.