In This Chapter

This chapter describes how to use the R-tree access method. It is written for application developers and schema designers who use R-tree indexes to index existing tables or design schemas that contain tables indexed by R-tree indexes. The chapter includes the following topics:

• Before You Begin
• Creating R-Tree Indexes
• When Does the Query Optimizer Use an R-Tree Index?
• R-Tree Indexes and Null Values
• Performing Nearest-Neighbor Searches
• Database Isolation Levels and R-Tree Indexes
• Functional R-Tree Indexes