A uniform indexing scheme for object-oriented databases

The performance of object oriented databases (OODB) is a critical factor hindering their current use. Several indexing schemes have been proposed in the literature for enhancing OODB performance and they are briefly reviewed here. A new and uniform indexing scheme is proposed. This scheme is based on a single B tree and combines both the hierarchical and nested indexing schemes (E. Bertino and W. Kim, 1989; W. Kim, 1990). The uniformity of this scheme enables compact and optimized code dealing with a large range of queries on the one hand, and flexibility in adding and removing indexed paths on the other hand. The performance of the scheme is about the same as existing schemes for single class, exact match or range queries, and much better for multi class and other complex queries and update.