An Indexing Method for Handling Queries on Set-Valued Attributes in Object-Oriented Databases

We propose a signature-based indexing method for object-oriented query handling in this paper. Signature file based access methods initially applied on text for their filtering capability have now been used to handle set-oriented queries in Object-Oriented Data Bases (OODBs). All the proposed techniques use either search methods that take longer retrieval time or tree based intermediate data structures that traverse multiple paths thus making comparison process tedious. In this paper a B+ tree based structure called Signature Declustering (SD) tree applied on set-valued attributes is presented. We apply and study the behavior of subset-superset queries of OODBs on SD-tree. It is observed that SDtree which is retrieving all matching signatures in a single access handles both types of queries efficiently. Also the maintenance cost and query response time of SD-tree is substantially reduced thus making it an efficient structure for handling Object Oriented queries.