Abstract

In this paper, we describe a performance evaluation of a particular group of multidimensional access methods, known as R-tree group, which are very important to improve the search performance of spatial database management systems. For these access methods, the paper investigates how the factor spatial data distribution affects the cost of the insertion of new entries into the structure and the cost of spatial selection queries. The main contributions of this work are: (i) the proposal of a methodology to analyze the impact of the factor spatial data distribution in the performance of multidimensional access methods, (ii) the performance results, which reveal novel performance relationships between multidimensional access methods not verified in previous related work, (iii) a critical and comparative analysis of related work. Keywords: multidimensional access methods, R-trees, performance evaluation and spatial database systems.