On the impact of flash SSDs on spatial indexing

Similarity queries are an important query type in multimedia databases. To implement these types of queries, database systems often use spatial index structures like the R*-Tree. However, the majority of performance evaluations for spatial index structures rely on a conventional background storage layer based on conventional hard drives. Since newer devices like solid-state-disks (SSD) have a completely different performance characteristic, it is an interesting question how far existing index structures profit from these modern storage devices. In this paper, we therefore examine the performance behaviour of the R*-Tree on an SSD compared to a conventional hard drive. Testing various influencing factors like system load, dimensionality and page size of the index our evaluation leads to interesting insights into the performance of spatial index structures on modern background storage layers.