Nowadays, a significant number of applications require the organization
of data elements that contain at least one spatial attribute. R-trees
have a simplicity of structure and, together with their resemblance to
the B-tree, allow developers to incorporate them easily into existing
database management systems for the support of spatial query processing.
This book provides an extensive survey of the R-tree evolution, studying
the applicability of the structure and its variations to efficient query
processing, accurate proposed cost models, and implementation issues
like concurrency control and parallelism.