
482 Data Structures Using C
Consider the B-tree given in Figure10.30. It is of order 5 because all the internal nodes have at
least |5/2| = 3 children and two keys. In fact, the maximum number of children and keys are 5 and 4,
respectively. As per rule number 3, each leaf node must contain at least |5/2| − 1 = 2 keys.
Fig. 10.30 A B-tree of size 5
70
10 25
79 85 98
34 47 69
4 7 12 23
82 84 87 9 2 110 12572 75
It may be noted that the node of a B-tree, by its nature, can accommodate more than one key. We
may design the size of a node to be as large as a block on the disk (say a sector). As a block is read at a
time from the disk, compared to a normal ...