Benchmarking spatial joins a la carte

Spatial joins are join operations that involve spatial data types and operators. Spatial access methods are often used to speed up the computation of spatial joins. This paper addresses the issue of benchmarking spatial join operations. For this purpose, we first present a WWW-based benchmark generator to produce sets of rectangles. Using a Web browser, experimenters can specify the number of rectangles in a sample, as well as the statistical distributions of their sizes, shapes, and locations. Second, using the generator and a well-defined set of statistical models we define several tests to compare the performance of three spatial join algorithms: nested loop, scan-and-index, and synchronized tree traversal. We also added a real-life data set from the Sequoia 2000 storage benchmark. Our results show that the relative performance of the different techniques mainly depends on two parameters: sample size, and selectivity of the join predicate. All of the statistical models and algorithms are available on the Web, which allows for easy verification and modification of our experiments.