Performance comparison of index schemes for range query of big data

During usage of data warehouse systems, queries are the most frequent operations over data. Among the queries, range queries are a typical type, which locate range of data according to some timestamp, location, or other attributes falling in a range of lower bound and upper bound. To accelerate range queries, people use different kinds of index schemes to index the data for later use. Indexes supporting range queries include B+ tree index, binned bitmap index and block range index etc. Firstly, we analyze the structure and characteristics of these indexes in detail. In big data applications, the volume of data is big, how are these index schemes performing is the problem we are concerning. We have designed a series of experiments to compare these index schemes in big data scenarios. We analyze the results and give some suggestions on applicable scenarios of these index schemes. Our results are practical guidelines for DBA to select different indexes in physical design of a database.