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Index nesting – an efficient approach to indexing in object-oriented databases

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Abstract.

In object-oriented database systems where the concept of the superclass-subclass is supported, an instance of a subclass is also an instance of its superclass. Consequently, the access scope of a query against a class in general includes the access scope of all its subclasses, unless specified otherwise. An index to support superclass-subclass relationship efficiently must provide efficient associative retrievals of objects from a single class or from several classes in a class hierarchy. This paper presents an efficient index called the hierarchical tree (the H-tree). For each class, an H-tree is maintained, allowing efficient search on a single class. These H-trees are appropriately linked to capture the superclass-subclass relationships, thus allowing efficient retrievals of instances from a class hierarchy. Both experimental and analytical results indicate that the H-tree is an efficient indexing structure.

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Edited by Ron Sacks-Davis.¶Received December 1992 / Revised May 1994 / Accepted May 1995

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Ooi, B., Han, J., Lu, H. et al. Index nesting – an efficient approach to indexing in object-oriented databases . The VLDB Journal 5, 215–228 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/s007780050025

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s007780050025

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