Performance of a composite attribute and join index

The use of a composite index known as the B/sub c/-tree is presented; it is based on the concept of the B/sup +/-tree and serves the dual purpose of an attribute and join index and indirectly implements the link sets. The leaf node of the B/sub c/-tree incorporates in each leaf node a reference to all tuples in the database that share common data values of a shared domain. In addition to improving the performance of the join and selection operations, the composite index facilitate the enforcement of structural integrity constraints. The author also presents the results of simulations that compare the performance of this approach with the simple join technique. The proposed approach, in the case of the simulated database, is seen to provide better performance for an average domain value size of greater than between 2 and 4 bytes.<
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