Space-Partitioning Trees in PostgreSQL: Realization and Performance

  • Authors:
  • Mohamed Y. Eltabakh;Ramy Eltarras;Walid G. Aref

  • Affiliations:
  • Purdue University;Purdue University;Purdue University

  • Venue:
  • ICDE '06 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Many evolving database applications warrant the use of non-traditional indexing mechanisms beyond B+-trees and hash tables. SP-GiST is an extensible indexing framework that broadens the class of supported indexes to include disk-based versions of a wide variety of space-partitioning trees, e.g., disk-based trie variants, quadtree variants, and kd-trees. This paper presents a serious attempt at implementing and realizing SP-GiST-based indexes inside PostgreSQL. Several index types are realized inside PostgreSQL facilitated by rapid SP-GiST instantiations. Challenges, experiences, and performance issues are addressed in the paper. Performance comparisons are conducted from within PostgreSQL to compare update and search performances of SP-GiST-based indexes against the B+-tree and the R-tree for string, point, and line segment data sets. Interesting results that highlight the potential performance gains of SPGiST- based indexes are presented in the paper.