Lecture 5. Storage and indexing

Readings:

• Paper to review: Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jeffrey F. Naughton and Avi Pfeffer. Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems. Proc. 21st Int'l Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, Zürich, September 1995, 562-573. Also in Red Book (3rd ed and 4th ed). Focus on Sections 1 through 4.2. [pdf]

• Review of fundamentals of storage and indexing. I am listing the following book chapters directly under "readings" rather than under "additional resources" because it is important that you review this material before coming to class. We will discuss the material below in class. In Database Management Systems:
  • Chapter 8: pages 273-282. If you get your hands on another database book, this is the introduction to the section on storage and indexing which briefly presents different access methods.
  • Chapter 10: pages 344-358. This is an in-depth discussion of the B+-Tree data structure and its implementation. Most database books, as well as any algorithms text (such as CLR or Knuth) will provide an equivalent discussion of B+-Trees.

As you read the paper, consider the following questions:

• What are the main contributions of this paper?
• What are the key insights behind GiST?
• To extend the GiST, a user must implement 6 methods. What is the role of each method? When is each method used?
• What are the limitations of this paper?

Lecture notes:

• lecture5.pdf

Additional resources:

• Chapters 8 through 11 (in the R&G book, third ed.) are all relevant to this lecture, but we will focus on the sections above.