The increasing use of temporal and spatial data in presentday relational systems necessitates an efficient support of joins on interval-valued attributes. Standard join algorithms do not support those data types adequately, whereas special approaches for interval joins usually require an augmentation of the internal access methods which is not supported by existing relational systems. To overcome these problems we introduce new join algorithms for interval data. Based on the Relational Interval Tree, these algorithms can easily be implemented on top of any relational database system while providing excellent performance on joining intervals. As experimental results on an Oracle9i server show, the new techniques outperform existing relational methods for joining intervals significantly. 1.

With the increasing occurrence of temporal and spatial data in present-day database applications, the interval data type is adopted by more and more database systems. For an efficient support of queries that contain selections on interval attributes as well as simple-valued attributes (e. g. numbers, strings) at the same time, special index structures are required supporting both types of predicates in combination. Based on the Relational Interval Tree, we present various indexing schemes that support such combined queries and can be integrated in relational database systems with minimum effort. Experiments on different query types show superior performance for the new techniques in comparison to competing access methods. 1.