We believe that this book (or parts of it) will be valuable to course instructors, undergraduate and postgraduate students studying access methods for advanced applications. Moreover, it will be a valuable companion to researchers and professionals working with access methods, because it presents in detail a broad range of concepts and techniques related to indexing, query processing, query optimization, and implementation. Finally, practitioners working in the development of access methods and database systems can use this book as a reference.
The order of presentation is the proposed reading order of the material. However, according to the reader's expertise in the area, it is possible to focus directly on the topic of interest by studying the corresponding chapters. Expert readers could skip the first part of the book, whereas non-experts are encouraged to start from the beginning. Evidently, if the reader wishes to study more details with respect to a specific topic, then the corresponding references should be consulted.
More precisely, undergraduate students can focus on Chapters 1 through 4 and Chapter 9 to grasp the main characteristics of the R-tree and related access methods, and to understand how query processing is performed in a spatial database system. Postgraduate students will find Chapters 5, 6, and 8 motivating for further research in the area, because efficient query processing and optimization techniques are active research fields. Course instructors and researchers should study all the material to select parts of the book required for class presentation or further research in the area.