
Chapter 9
Incorporating Other Physical
Structures
Over time, new releases of database management system (DBMS) products
introduced additional types of access path methods to deal with scenarios
that did not perform as efficiently as expected. Examples of such new fea-
tures include various forms of data partitioning, materialized views, cubes,
and hash, bitmap, partial, Extensible Markup Language (XML), columnar,
spatial, and multidimensional indexes. Each new such structure comes along
with its own benefits and overheads, and it is generally challenging to under-
stand when and how to leverage its functionality. For that reason, after each
new such structure ...