Data Structures the Fun Way

12 B-trees

Chapter 11 showed how the cost of memory access can vary across mediums. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how this problem extends beyond accessing individual values to the cost of accessing new blocks of data, introducing a new data structure to handle this situation.

Computer science is full of instances where accessing data within a block is cheap, but retrieving a new block is comparatively expensive. A computer might read an entire block of information, known as a page, from the hard drive and store it in memory. In the days of floppy disk–based video games, you might see a message directing you to “Insert disk 5 of 7” or wait ...