Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of new database applications such as CAD/CAM systems, spatial information systems and multimedia information systems. The needs of these applications are far more complex than traditional business applications. They call for support of objects with complex data types, such as images and spatial objects, and for support of objects with wildly varying numbers of index terms, such as documents. Traditional indexing techniques such as the B-tree and its variants do not efficiently support these applications, and so new indexing mechanisms have been developed. As a result of the demand for database support for new applications, there has been a proliferation of new indexing techniques. Designed for practitioners and database and application developers, this work explains best practice, guiding the selection of appropriate indexes for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more robust indexes. For newcomers, it serves as an overview of the wide range of advanced indexing techniques. This book should be suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on indexing techniques and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.