One-dimensional range queries, as one of the most basic type of queries in databases, have been studied extensively in the literature. For large databases, the goal is to build an external index that is optimized for disk block accesses (or I/Os). The problem is well understood in the static case. Theoretically, there exists an index of linear size that can answer a range query in O(1 + K B ) I/Os, where K is the output size and B is the disk block size, but it is highly impractical. In

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... , the standard solution is the B-tree, which answers a query in O(log B * A preliminary version of the paper appeared in PODS'09.