Object-Relational Indexing for General Interval Relationships

Intervals represen t a fundamental data type for temporal, scientific, and spatial databases where time stamp s and d point data are extended to time spans and range data, res pectively. For O LTP and OLAP a pplications on large amounts of data, no t only intersection que ries have to be processed efficiently but a lso general interval relationships including before, meets, overlaps, starts, finishes, contains, equals, during, startedBy, finishedBy, overlappedBy, metBy and after. Our new algorithms use the Relational Interval Tree, a purely SQL-based and object-relationally wrapped index structure. The technique therefore preserves the industrial strength of the underly ing RDBMS including stability, transactions, and performance. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated by an experimental evaluation on area l weblog data set containing one million sessions.