A spatial bitmap-based index for geographical data warehouses

Abstract

In this paper we propose the Spatial Bitmap Index (SB-index), which is an index based on Bitmap and Minimum Bounding Rectangle (MBR) to provide efficient query processing in Geographical Data Warehouses. The SB-index is built on the primary key of a spatial dimension table, and maintains the MBR of a given spatial attribute. Query processing requires a scan on the index, which compares both the query spatial predicate and the current MBR. This scan supplies a set of candidate solutions to a refinement step that evaluates each candidate. Finally, only the index entries from objects that satisfy the spatial predicate must be accessed, in order to answer the submitted query. Comparisons between the SB-index and the star-join indexed with R-tree and GiST showed significantly improvement of 25% up to 95% with regards to the query processing time. This performance gain occurs since SB-index restricts a set of candidates and avoids the star-join calculation. Copyright 2009 ACM.