Interval processing with the UB-Tree

Abstract

Advanced data warehouses and Web databases have set the demand for processing large sets of time ranges, quality classes, fuzzy data, personalized data and extended objects. Since, all of these data types can be mapped to intervals, interval indexing can dramatically speed up or even be an enabling technology for these new applications. We introduce a method for managing intervals by indexing the dual space with the UB-Tree. We show that our method is an effective and efficient solution, benefitting from all good characteristics of the UB-Tree, i.e., concurrency control, worst case guarantees for insertion, deletion and update as well as efficient query processing. Our technique can easily be integrated into an RDBMS engine providing the UB-Tree as access method. We also show that our technique is superior and more flexible to previously suggested techniques.