Slide 15.1: A B-tree

A B-tree

B-trees are now the standard way to represent indexes. They are guaranteed to be height-balanced and to have search, insert, and delete operations whose execution times are linear in the height of the tree. Thus, they solve the problem of high cost of insertion and deletion. The solutions are

Index records do not need to be full.
Insertion splits an overfull record into two records, each half full.
Deletion merges two records into a single record when necessary.

The definition of a B-tree is

A balanced search tree in which every node has between ⌈m/2⌉ and m children, where m>1 is an integer. Root may have as few as zero child and leaves have no children.

The maximum number of keys in a record is called the order of the B-tree. Not all the keys of a B-tree are stored in the leaves. Thus, the B-trees discussed in the textbook are actually B⁺ trees without sequential links. We will follow the terminology used in the textbook. A B⁺ tree is

A B-tree where the leaves are linked sequentially, thus allowing both fast random access and sequential access to data. The keys of a B⁺ tree are stored in the leaves.

For example, the figure on the right shows an example of a B-tree defined in the textbook.