A Novel Index Supporting High Volume Data Warehouse Insertion

While the desire to support fast, ad hoc query processing for large data warehouses has motivated the recent introduction of many new indexing structures, with a few notable exceptions (namely, the LSM-Tree [4] and the Stepped Merge Method [1]) little attention has been given to developing new indexing schemes that allow fast insertions. Since additions to a large warehouse may number in the millions per day, indices that require a disk seek (or even a significant fraction of a seek) per insertion are not acceptable. In this paper, we offer an alternative to the B+-tree called the Y-tree for indexing huge warehouses having frequent insertions. The Y-tree is a new indexing structure supporting both point and range queries over a single attribute, with retrieval performance comparable to the B+-tree. For processing insertions, however, the Y-tree may exhibit a speedup of 100 times over batched insertions into a B+-tree.