Range queries involving spatial relations: A performance analysis

Spatial relations are becoming an important aspect of spatial access methods because of the increasing interest on qualitative spatial information processing. In this paper we show how queries involving spatial relations can be transformed to range queries and implemented in existing DBMSs. We provide a performance analysis of B- and R- tree indexing methods to support such queries and we evaluate the analytical formulas using experimental results. The proposed analytical models for the expected retrieval cost of spatial relations are proved to be good guidelines for a spatial query optimiser.