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Why does UCSC genome browser NOT using spatial index?
UCSC genome browser uses binning strategy to retrieve genes more efficiently than simply creating a B-tree on the start and end coordinates. This certainly serves the purpose well because query ranges is not a strengthen of B-tree. But binning + B-tree basically provides a crude approximation to R-tree (using spatial index) that has already been implemented in MySQL. I'm wondering why is this spatial index not used in the first place? Is it because the spatial index is a relatively new feature that was not implemented in MySQL when the UCSC GB was developed? Just curious.
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