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.

Advanced Database Indexing begins by introducing basic material on storage media, including magnetic disks, RAID systems and tertiary storage such as optical disk and tapes. Typical access methods (e.g. B+ trees, dynamic hash files and secondary key retrieval) are also introduced. The remainder of the book discusses recent advances in indexing and access methods for particular database applications. More specifically, issues such as external sorting, file structures for intervals, temporal access methods, spatial and spatio-temporal indexing, image and multimedia indexing, perfect external hashing methods, parallel access methods, concurrency issues in indexing and parallel external sorting are presented for the first time in a single book. Advanced Database Indexing is an excellent reference for database professionals and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

This text integrates different mobility data handling processes, from database management to multi-dimensional analysis and mining, into a unified presentation driven by the spectrum of requirements raised by real-world applications. It presents a step-by-step methodology to understand and exploit mobility data: collecting and cleansing data, storage in Moving Object Database (MOD) engines, indexing, processing, analyzing and mining mobility data. Emerging issues, such as semantic and privacy-aware querying and mining as well as distributed data processing, are also covered. Theoretical presentation is smoothly interchanged with hands-on exercises and case studies involving an actual MOD engine. The authors are established experts who address both theoretical and practical dimensions of the field but also present valuable prototype software. The background context, clear explanations and sample exercises make this an ideal textbook for graduate students studying database management, data mining and geographic information systems.