Indexing Set-Valued Attributes with a Multi-level Extendible Hashing Scheme

We present an access method for set-valued attributes that is based on a multi-level extendible hashing scheme. This scheme avoids exponential directory growth for skewed data and thus generates a much smaller number of subqueries for query sets (so far fast-growing directories have prohibited hash-based index structures for set-valued retrieval). We demonstrate the advantages of our scheme over regular extendible hashing both analytically and experimentally. We also implemented a prototype and briefly summarize the results of our experimental evaluation