ABSTRACT
Many of the previous chapters have shown that efficient strategies for complex datastructuring problems are essential in the design of fast algorithms for a variety of applications, including combinatorial optimization, information retrieval and Web search, databases and data mining, and geometric applications. The goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with an overview of the important data structures that are used in the implementation of a modern, general-purpose database management system (DBMS). In earlier chapters of the book the reader has already been exposed to many of the data structures employed in a DBMS context (e.g., B-trees, buffer trees, quad trees, R-trees, interval trees, hashing). Hence, we will focus mainly on their application but also introduce other important data structures to solve some of the fundamental data management problems such as query processing and optimization, efficient representation of data on disk, as well as the transfer of data from main memory to disk. Due to space constraints, we cannot cover applications of data structures to manage non-standard data such as multi-dimensional data, spatial and temporal data, multimedia data, or XML.
