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B+-Tree

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Synonyms

B-tree

Definition

The B+-tree is a disk-based, paginated, dynamically updateable, balanced, and treelike index structure. It supports the exact match query as well as insertion/deletion operations in O(logpn) I/Os, where n is the number of records in the tree and p is the page capacity in number of records. It also supports the range searches in O(logpn + tp) I/Os, where t is the number of records in the query result.

Historical Background

The binary search tree is a well-known data structure. When the data volume is so large that the tree does not fit in main memory, a disk-based search tree is necessary. The most commonly used disk-based search trees are the B-tree and its variations. Originally invented by Bayer and McCreight [2], the B-tree may be regarded as an extension of the balanced binary tree, since a B-tree is always balanced (i.e., all leaf nodes are on the same level). Since each disk access retrieves or updates an entire block of information between memory and...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bayer R. The universal B-tree for multidimensional indexing: general concepts. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Worldwide Computing and Its Applications; 1997. p. 198–209.

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  2. Bayer R, McCreight EM. Organization and maintenance of large ordered indices. Acta Inf. 1972;1(3):173–89.

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  3. Comer D. The ubiquitous B-tree. ACM Comput Surv. 1979;11(2):121–37.

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  5. Robinson JT. K-D-B tree: a search structure for large multidimensional dynamic indexes. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1981. p. 10–8.

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  7. Theodoridis Y. The R-tree-portal. 2003. http://www.rtreeportal.org

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Correspondence to Donghui Zhang .

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Zhang, D., Baclawski, K.P., Tsotras, V.J. (2018). B+-Tree. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_739

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