Recall that all cells in a dense fragment must have a value, which TileDB materializes on disk. This characteristic of dense fragments is important as it considerably simplifies spatial indexing, which becomes almost implicit. Consider the example in the figure below. Knowing the space tile extent along each dimension and the tile order, we can easily identify which space tiles intersect with a subarray query without maintaining any complicated index. Then, using lightweight bookkeeping (such as offsets of data tiles on disk, compressed data tile size, etc.), TileDB can fetch the tiles containing results from storage to main memory. Finally, knowing the cell order, it can locate each slab of contiguous cell results in constant time (again without extra indexing) and minimize the number of memory copy operations.