Fundamental Issues -- Spatial Database Concepts -- The R-Tree and Variations -- Nearest Neighbor Search in Spatial and Spatiotemporal Databases -- Nearest Neighbor Queries -- Analysis of Nearest Neighbor Queries -- Nearest Neighbor Queries in Moving Objects -- Nearest Neighbor Search with Multiple Resources -- Parallel and Distributed Databases -- Multidisk Query Processing -- Multiprocessor Query Processing -- Distributed Query Processing.Modern applications are both data and computationally intensive and require the storage and manipulation of voluminous traditional (alphanumeric) and nontraditional data sets (images, text, geometric objects, time-series). Examples of such emerging application domains are: Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Multimedia Information Systems, CAD/CAM, Time-Series Analysis, Medical Information Sstems, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Data Mining. These applications pose diverse requirements with respect to the information and the operations that need to be supported. From the database perspective, new techniques and tools therefore need to be developed towards increased processing efficiency. This monograph explores the way spatial database management systems aim at supporting queries that involve the space characteristics of the underlying data, and discusses query processing techniques for nearest neighbor queries. It provides both basic concepts and state-of-the-art results in spatial databases and parallel processing research, and studies numerous applications of nearest neighbor queries.