Index set: A practical indexing scheme for object database systems

Ecient indexing in a class hierarchy is essential for the achievement of high performance in query evaluation for object database management systems. In this paper, we present a practical indexing scheme, index set, which provides good index con®guration for any real database environment. The proposed scheme considers the distribution of key values, as well as query patterns such as query weight on each class. The index set can easily be applied to any database system, since it uses the well-known B ‡-tree structure. We develop a cost model and, through experiments, demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme over various class hierarchies.