Metric Access Methods (MAM) are employed to accelerate the processing of similarity queries, such as the range and the k-nearest neighbor queries. Current methods, such as the Slim-tree and the M-tree, improve the query performance minimizing the number of disk accesses, keeping a constant height of the structures stored on disks (height-balanced trees). However, the overlapping between their nodes has a very high influence on their performance. This paper presents a new dynamic MAM called the

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... BM-tree (Density-Based Metric tree), which can minimize the overlap between high-density nodes by relaxing the height-balancing of the structure. Thus, the height of the tree is larger in denser regions, in order to keep a tradeoff between breadth-searching and depth-searching. An underpinning for cost estimation on tree structures is their height, so we show a non-height dependable cost model that can be applied for DBM-tree. Moreover, an optimization algorithm called Shrink is also presented, which improves the performance of an already built DBM-tree by reorganizing the elements among their nodes. Experiments performed over both synthetic and real world datasets showed that the DBM-tree is, in average, 50% faster than traditional MAM and reduces the number of distance calculations by up to 72% and disk accesses by up to 66%. After performing the Shrink algorithm, the performance improves up to 40% regarding the number of disk accesses for range and k-nearest neighbor queries. In addition, the DBM-tree scales up well, exhibiting linear performance with growing number of elements in the database.