25-08-2017, 09:32 PM
B-Trees
B-Trees[.doc (Size: 108 KB / Downloads: 21)
Introduction
A B-tree is a specialized multiway tree designed especially for use on disk. In a B-tree each node may contain a large number of keys. The number of subtrees of each node, then, may also be large. A B-tree is designed to branch out in this large number of directions and to contain a lot of keys in each node so that the height of the tree is relatively small. This means that only a small number of nodes must be read from disk to retrieve an item. The goal is to get fast access to the data, and with disk drives this means reading a very small number of records. Note that a large node size (with lots of keys in the node) also fits with the fact that with a disk drive one can usually read a fair amount of data at once.
Definitions
A multiway tree of order m is an ordered tree where each node has at most m children. For each node, if k is the actual number of children in the node, then k - 1 is the number of keys in the node. If the keys and subtrees are arranged in the fashion of a search tree, then this is called a multiway search tree of order m. For example, the following is a multiway search tree of order 4. Note that the first row in each node shows the keys, while the second row shows the pointers to the child nodes. Of course, in any useful application there would be a record of data associated with each key, so that the first row in each node might be an array of records where each record contains a key and its associated data. Another approach would be to have the first row of each node contain an array of records where each record contains a key and a record number for the associated data record, which is found in another file. This last method is often used when the data records are large. The example software will use the first method.
Example B-Tree
The following is an example of a B-tree of order 5. This means that (other that the root node) all internal nodes have at least ceil(5 / 2) = ceil(2.5) = 3 children (and hence at least 2 keys). Of course, the maximum number of children that a node can have is 5 (so that 4 is the maximum number of keys). According to condition 4, each leaf node must contain at least 2 keys. In practice B-trees usually have orders a lot bigger than 5.
Operations on a B-Tree
Question: How would you search in the above tree to look up S? How about J? How would you do a sort-of "in-order" traversal, that is, a traversal that would produce the letters in ascending order? (One would only do such a traversal on rare occasion as it would require a large amount of disk activity and thus be very slow!)
Inserting a New Item
According to Kruse (see reference at the end of this file) the insertion algorithm proceeds as follows: When inserting an item, first do a search for it in the B-tree. If the item is not already in the B-tree, this unsuccessful search will end at a leaf. If there is room in this leaf, just insert the new item here. Note that this may require that some existing keys be moved one to the right to make room for the new item. If instead this leaf node is full so that there is no room to add the new item, then the node must be "split" with about half of the keys going into a new node to the right of this one. The median (middle) key is moved up into the parent node. (Of course, if that node has no room, then it may have to be split as well.) Note that when adding to an internal node, not only might we have to move some keys one position to the right, but the associated pointers have to be moved right as well. If the root node is ever split, the median key moves up into a new root node, thus causing the tree to increase in height by one.