A Review of Recent Work on Multi-attribute Access Methods
Most database systems provide database designers with single attribute indexing capability via some form of B+tree. Multi-attribute search structures are rare, and are mostly found in systems specialized to some more narrow application area, e.g. geographic databases. The reason is that no multi-attribute search structure has been demonstrated, with high confidence. Multi-attribute search is an active area of research. This paper reviews the state of this field and some of the difficult problems, and reviews some recent notable papers.
Copyright © 1992 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library -http://www.acm.org/dl/.