Using a Cluster Manager in a Spatial Database System Thomas Brinkhoff   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Spatial Database Clustering Abstract An important goal for a spatial database system is to minimize the I/O-cost of queries and other operations. One essential component to achieve this objective is the buffer manager. The placement of the spatial objects on disk pages is another important factor; a reasonable clustering of the objects helps to minimize the I/O-cost of queries. However, it is a difficult task to define and maintain an efficient clustering. In this paper, a cluster manager is proposed, which re-clusters spatial objects dynamically. The reorganization is performed using the pages kept in main memory by the buffer manager. Therefore, no additional disk accesses are required for non-static spatial databases. For deciding which spatial objects should be stored together, the requests for the objects are recorded and analyzed. An experimental performance evaluation compares the impact of several parameter settings on different spatial que-ries. It is demonstrated that significant performance gains can be achieved by using the cluster manager. DiSC'02 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery