Question

I developing an application (in C#) where objects are active under a period of time, they have from and to properties of DateTime-type. Now I want to speed up my search routine for queries like: Are there other active objects in this timeperiod/at this time.

Is there any existing temporal index I can use or can I use QuadTree/other tree-structures to search in an efficient way.

Answer 1

You should also take a look at the interval tree:

In computer science, an interval tree
is an ordered tree data structure to
hold intervals. Specifically, it
allows one to efficiently find all
intervals that overlap with any given
interval or point.

And that reminds me of this SO question.