B-Trees

Abstract

This chapter covers one of the more important data structures of the last thirty years. B-Trees are primarily used by relational databases to efficiently implement an operation called join. B-Trees have other properties that are also useful for databases including ordering of rows within a table, fast delete capability, and sequential access. The chapter begins by introducing some terminology from relational databases to motivate the need for B-Trees. It goes on to introduce the B-Tree data structure and its implementation. By the end of this chapter you should have an understanding of B-Trees, their advantages over other data structures, and you should be able to demonstrate your understanding by implementing a B-Tree that can be used to efficiently process em joins in relational databases.