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Insertion into R-tree

Insertion of an object R occurs as follows:
  • start at root, look for children that completely contain R
  • if no child completely contains R, choose one of the children and expand its boundaries so that it does contain R
  • if several children contain R, choose one and proceed to child
  • repeat above containment search in children of current node
  • once we reach data page, insert R if there is room
  • if no room in data page, replace by two data pages
  • partition existing objects between two data pages
  • update node pointing to data pages
    (may cause B-tree-like propagation of node changes up into tree)
Note that R may be a point or a polygon.