Introduction

Abstract

AbstractDuring the last few years, it became obvious that object-relational database management systems (ORDBMS) are the next great wave in database technology ([15], [96], [104]). ORDBMS have been proposed for all data intensive applications that need both complex queries and complex data types [104]. Typical ORDBMS application areas are e.g. multi-media [70] and image applications [77], especially for web databases [58], geographic information systems ([89], [107]), and management of time series [6] and documents [52]. Many of these applications pose high requirements with respect to functionality and performance on ORDBMS. Since the data volumes that come along with new data types like satellite images, videos, CAD objects, etc. are gigantic and the queries are complex, parallel database technology is essential for many of these applications. These observations have in recent years led to significant development efforts for parallel ORDBMS (PORDBMS) of some database vendors ([19], [81], [83], [85]). Although first industrial implementations enter the marketplace and the SQL3 standard [69] is maturing, there are still many topics left for research in this area ([13], [23], [24], [85], [98])KeywordsParallel ExecutionGeographic Information SystemQuery OptimizationData ParallelismDatabase OperatorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.