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M-tree: An Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces

Summary: Introduces the balanced M-tree, a disk-based index for generic metric spaces using only distance functions satisfying the metric axioms. Supports range and k-NN search, with experiments showing scalability and practical performance beyond vector-space indexing. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
8634
Venue
VLDB
Year
1997
Pagerank
0.00040719947
Overall Rank
56 | 99.62%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{ciaccia_vldb97,
        title = {{M-tree: An Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces}},
        author = {Ciaccia, Paolo and Patella, Marco and Zezula, Pavel},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '97},
        pages = {426--435},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 48 of 98 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
6,746 Flexible Aggregate Similarity Search 2011 SIGMOD 5.7850397e-05
6,858 A Generic Framework for Efficient and Effective Subsequence Retrieval 2012 VLDB 5.7523396e-05
7,124 GTI: Graph-based Tree Index with Logarithm Updates for Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2025 VLDB 5.6961208e-05
7,185 Anytime Measures for Top-k Algorithms 2007 VLDB 5.6779179e-05
7,360 On the Efficiency of K-Means Clustering: Evaluation, Optimization, and Algorithm Selection 2021 VLDB 5.6340845e-05
7,376 LiteHST: A Tree Embedding based Method for Similarity Search 2023 SIGMOD 5.6298131e-05
7,474 GTS: GPU-based Tree Index for Fast Similarity Search 2024 SIGMOD 5.6093517e-05
7,715 Cache-oblivious High-performance Similarity Join 2019 SIGMOD 5.5606224e-05
7,739 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.5553554e-05
7,839 Set Similarity Join on Probabilistic Data 2010 VLDB 5.5340666e-05
7,990 ScalaGiST: Scalable Generalized Search Trees for MapReduce Systems [Innovative Systems Paper] 2014 VLDB 5.5107935e-05
8,078 Indexing Mixed Types for Approximate Retrieval 2005 VLDB 5.492543e-05
8,200 Waffle: A Workload-Aware and Query-Sensitive Framework for Disk-Based Spatial Indexing 2023 VLDB 5.4677285e-05
8,391 Similarity Search for Adaptive Ellipsoid Queries Using Spatial Transformation 2001 VLDB 5.4356884e-05
8,733 FINEX: A Fast Index for Exact & Flexible Density-Based Clustering 2023 SIGMOD 5.3766157e-05
8,765 Contorting High Dimensional Data for Efficient Main Memory KNN Processing 2003 SIGMOD 5.3766157e-05
8,848 A Generalized Approach for Reducing Expensive Distance Calls for A Broad Class of Proximity Problems 2021 SIGMOD 5.3577837e-05
8,988 Towards Systematic Index Dynamization 2024 VLDB 5.3384135e-05
9,165 Dimensional Testing for Reverse k-Nearest Neighbor Search 2017 VLDB 5.3101672e-05
9,236 Wolverine: Highly Efficient Monotonic Search Path Repair for Graph-based ANN Index Updates 2025 VLDB 5.3016261e-05
9,261 Hypersphere Dominance: An Optimal Approach 2014 SIGMOD 5.2968259e-05
9,262 Using Sets of Feature Vectors for Similarity Search on Voxelized CAD Objects 2003 SIGMOD 5.2968259e-05
9,334 Adaptive Indexing in High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 2023 VLDB 5.2884486e-05
9,407 RWalks: Random Walks as Attribute Diffusers for Filtered Vector Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.2751121e-05
10,036 VStream: A Distributed Streaming Vector Search System 2025 VLDB 5.173224e-05
10,189 Adaptive Outlier Detection over Data Stream 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,336 Accelerating High-Dimensional ANN Search via Skipping Redundant Distance Computations 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,359 DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,412 TRIM: Accelerating High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search with Enhanced Triangle-Inequality-Based Pruning 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,469 LM-Tree: A Hybrid Learned Index for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,629 MS-Index: Fast Top-k Subsequence Search for Multivariate Time Series under Euclidean Distance 2026 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,334 LARGE: A Length-Aggregation-based Grid Structure for Line Density Visualization 2024 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,573 DESIRE: An Efficient Dynamic Cluster-based Forest Indexing for Similarity Search in Multi-Metric Spaces 2022 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,924 EPUI: Experimental Platform for Urban Informatics 2018 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,929 ZigZag: Supporting Similarity Queries on Vector Space Models 2018 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,940 MSQL+: A Plugin Toolkit for Similarity Search under Metric Spaces in Distributed Relational Database Systems 2018 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,103 Indexing Metric Uncertain Data for Range Queries 2015 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,204 YZStack: Provisioning Customizable Solution for Big Data 2014 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,288 QuEval: Beyond high-dimensional indexing à la carte 2013 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,368 Exact Indexing for Support Vector Machines 2011 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,371 Effective Data Co-Reduction for Multimedia Similarity Search 2011 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,463 Efficient RkNN Retrieval with Arbitrary Non-Metric Similarity Measures 2010 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,472 Transforming Range Queries To Equivalent Box Queries To Optimize Page Access 2010 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,674 MIST: Distributed Indexing and Querying in Sensor Networks using Statistical Models 2007 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,704 Using High Dimensional Indexes to Support Relevance Feedback Based Interactive Images Retrieval 2006 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,778 Indexing and Mining Streams 2004 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,818 The ND-Tree: A Dynamic Indexing Technique for Multidimensional Non-ordered Discrete Data Spaces 2003 VLDB 5.093636e-05
12,863 Fast Evaluation Techniques for Complex Similarity Queries 2001 VLDB 5.093636e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2 R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching 1984 SIGMOD 0.0020210012
4 The R*-tree: An Efficient and Robust Access Method for Points and Rectangles 1990 SIGMOD 0.001157935
28 Nearest Neighbor Queries 1995 SIGMOD 0.00052102434
41 Fast Subsequence Matching in Time-Series Databases 1994 SIGMOD 0.00046675394
85 The X-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Data 1996 VLDB 0.00035405879
202 Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems (Extended Abstract) 1995 VLDB 0.00025454884
483 FastMap: A Fast Algorithm for Indexing, Data-Mining and Visualization of Traditional and Multimedia Datasets 1995 SIGMOD 0.00017756569
592 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD 0.00016029789
784 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB 0.00014069958
1,384 Content-Based Image Indexing 1994 VLDB 0.00010957733
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 6,947 Indexing for Subtree Similarity-Search using Edit Distance 2013 SIGMOD
2 2,421 Multidimensional Access Methods: Trees Have Grown Everywhere 1997 VLDB
3 8,391 Similarity Search for Adaptive Ellipsoid Queries Using Spatial Transformation 2001 VLDB
4 1,778 The A-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Spaces Using Relative Approximation 2000 VLDB
5 10,469 LM-Tree: A Hybrid Learned Index for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces 2026 SIGMOD
6 3,047 Similarity Evaluation on Tree-structured Data 2005 SIGMOD
7 9,334 Adaptive Indexing in High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 2023 VLDB
8 784 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB
9 592 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD
10 2,101 A Cost Model for Similarity Queries in Metric Spaces 1998 PODS