On a model of indexability and its bounds for range queries

  • Authors:

  • Joseph M. Hellerstein;Elias Koutsoupias;Daniel P. Miranker;Christos H. Papadimitriou;Vasilis Samoladas

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, CA;University of California, Los Angeles, CA;University of Texas, Austin, TX;University of California, Berkeley, CA;University of Texas, Austin, TX

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We develop a theoretical framework to characterize the hardness of indexing data sets on block-access memory devices like hard disks. We define an indexing workload by a data set and a set of potential queries. For a workload, we can construct an indexing scheme, which is a collection of fixed-sized subsets of the data. We identify two measures of efficiency for an indexing scheme on a workload: storage redundancy, r (how many times each item in the data set is stored), and access overhead, A (how many times more blocks than necessary does a query retrieve).For many interesting families of workloads, there exists a trade-off between storage redundancy and access overhead. Given a desired access overhead A, there is a minimum redundancy that any indexing scheme must exhibit. We prove a lower-bound theorem for deriving the minimum redundancy. By applying this theorem, we show interesting upper and lower bounds and trade-offs between A and r in the case of multidimensional range queries and set queries.