ABSTRACT
Spatial database management systems must be able to store and process large amounts of disk-resident spatial data. Multidimensional data support is needed in many fields including geographic information systems (GIS), computer aided design (CAD), and medical, multimedia, and scientific databases. Spatial data operations that need to be supported include spatial joins and various types of queries such as intersection, containment, topological and proximity queries. The challenge, and primary performance objective, for applications dealing with disk-resident data is to minimize the number of disk retrievals, or I/Os, needed to answer a query. Main memory data structures are designed to reduce computation time rather than I/O, and hence are not directly applicable to a disk based environment.
