Despite two decades of research in moving object databases and a few research prototypes that have been proposed, there is not yet a mainstream system targeted for industrial use. In this article, we present MobilityDB, a moving object database that extends the type system of PostgreSQL and PostGIS with abstract data types for representing moving object data. The types are fully integrated into the platform to reuse its powerful data management features. Furthermore, MobilityDB builds on existing operations, indexing, aggregation, and optimization framework. This is all made accessible via the SQL query interface.
This paper demonstrates the MobilityDB moving object database system. It is an extensive implementation on top of PostgreSQL and PostGIS with multiple novel aspects. MobilityDB defines multiple spatiotemporal types for moving geometry and geography points, as well as for temporal integers, reals, Booleans, and strings. It also defines a rich set of operations on these types. The types are supported with spatiotemporal index access methods by extending GiST (Generalized Search Tree) and SP-GiST (Space Partitioning GiST). The query interface is SQL. MobilityDB thus extends the PostgreSQL optimizer with statistics collectors and selectivity estimation functions. It is available as open source. The demonstration includes a scenario with multiple queries, and a publicly accessible query interface on the Web.
CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Spatial-temporal systems.
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