B-Trees, B+Trees and Simple Prefix B+ Trees in Perspective I
B and B+ Trees are not the only tools useful for File Structure Design. Simple Indexes are useful when they can be held fully into memory and Hashing can provide much faster access than B and B+ Trees.
Common Characteristics of B and B+ and Prefix B+ Trees:
- Paged Index Structures ==> Broad and shallow trees
- Height-Balanced Trees
- The trees are grown Bottom Up and the operations used are: block splitting, merging and re-distribution
- Two-to-Three Splitting and redistribution can be used to obtain greater storage efficiency.
- Can be implemented as Virtual Tree Structures.
- Can be adapted for use with variable-length records.