1 Introduction
In modern database systems, a file is a collection of records and each record has a number of attributes. A subset of the attributes acts as a key for each record. The primary key is the key that uniquely distinguishes a record from all others, while all the remainings are the secondary keys. Each attribute in a key is called a field. A query is a specification of values for zero or more fields of a record. In a partial match query (PMQ), one of the fileds is specified in a record while the other is not. In a range query (RQ), the ranges of some fields are specified. Typical approaches for solving PMQs and RQs include B-trees ([39], [44]), inverted files [9], and multiattribute hashing [41]. Our study focuses on applying multiattribute hashing to the RQ problems.