Space support in databases poses new challenges in every part of a database management system & the capability of spatial support in the physical layer is considered very important. This has led to the design of spatial access methods to enable the effective & efficient management of spatial objects.
R-trees have a simplicity of structure & together with their resemblance to the B-tree, allow developers to incorporate them easily into existing database management systems for the support of spatial query processing.

This book provides an extensive survey of the R-tree evolution, studying the applicability of the structure & its variations to efficient query processing, accurate proposed cost models, & implementation issues like concurrency control and parallelism. Written for database researchers, designers & programmers as well as graduate students, this comprehensive monograph will be a welcome addition to the field.

Fundamental Concepts.- Dynamic Versions of R-trees.- Static Versions of R-trees.- Query Processing Issues.- Fundamental Query Processing Techniques.- Processing More Complex Queries.- R-Trees In Modern Applications.- R-trees in Spatiotemporal Databases.- R-trees for Multimedia, Warehousing and Mining.- Advanced Issues.- Query Optimization Issues.- Implementation Issues.