A Study of Four Index Structures for Set-Valued Attributes of Low Cardinality
Sven Helmer, Guido Moerkotte · MADOC (University of Mannheim) · 1999
We review and study the performance of four different index structures for indexing set-valued attributes designed to speed up set equality, subset and superset queries. All index structures are based on traditional techniques, namely signatures and inverted files. More specifically, we consider sequential signature files, signature trees, extendible signature hashing, and a B-tree based implementation of inverted lists. The latter is refined by a compression scheme in order to keep space requirements within acceptable bounds. The performance study is based on real implementations subjected to a benchmark accounting for different set sizes, domain sizes, and data distributions (uniform and skewed).