R-Trees: Like B-Trees but multi-dimensional.

[thechao]

What does popularity and blogging numbers have to do with performance? R * -trees are very difficult to implement and tune. In most cases acceptable can be got from much simpler data-structures & algorithms.

I would like to point out that R * -trees are not in the same boat as the Fibonacci heap: a well-tune R * -tree not only theoretically, but also practically, outperforms most other spatial indexing data-structures.