Space support in databases poses new challenges in every part of a
database management system & the capability of spatial support in the
physical layer is considered very important. This has led to the design
of spatial access methods to enable the effective & efficient management
of spatial objects.
R-trees have a simplicity of structure & 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 & its variations to efficient query
processing, accurate proposed cost models, & implementation issues like
concurrency control and parallelism. Written for database researchers,
designers & programmers as well as graduate students, this comprehensive
monograph will be a welcome addition to the field.