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by AlphaSite 1965 days ago
Isn’t sorting required for range based indexes?
2 comments

Not necessarily. If you have indexing structures for data types that do not have a total order, only a partial order, you can store and do an indexed range search on data types that do have a total order. The primary implication is that the output of the range search will not reflect the total order in the way it would for a traditional B+Tree.
Same question. Can you give me an example of an indexing scheme that works on non-sortable data? I can’t think of any.
The canonical example is indexing rectangles. They have no total order. It is far from the only example. Any data type where equality and intersection are not equivalent test functions will effectively be non-sortable.

There are many indexing schemes for data with these properties. They focus on topological relationships rather than order relationships.

Do you know of any blog/papers which talks about this - using topology for such interval data types.