DBMSs must offer spatial query processing capabilities to meet the needs op applications such as cartography, geographic information processing and CAD many data structures and algorithms that process grid representations of spatial data have appeared in the literature we unify much of this work by identifying common principles and distilling them into a small set of constructs. (published data structures and algorithms can be derived as special cases) we show these constructs can be supported with only minor modifications to current DBMS implementations the ideas are demonstrated in the context of the range query problem analytical and experimental evidence indicates that performance of the derived solution is very good (e.g., comparable to performance of the KD tree.)