Cost models for join queries in spatial databases

The join query is one of the fundamental operations in database management systems (DBMSs). Modern DBMSs should be able to support non traditional data, including spatial objects, in an efficient manner. Towards this goal, spatial data structures can be adopted in order to support the execution of join queries on sets of multidimensional data. The paper introduces analytical models that estimate the cost (in terms of node or disk accesses) of join queries involving two multidimensional indexed data sets using R tree based structures. In addition, experimental results are presented, which show the accuracy of the analytical estimations when compared to actual runs on both synthetic and real data sets. It turns out that the relative error rarely exceeds 15% for all combinations, a fact that makes the proposed cost models useful tools for efficient spatial query optimization.