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Balanced Trees

A B-tree is a tree data structure that keeps data sorted and allows efficient searches, insertions, and deletions. It is optimized for systems that read and write large blocks of data like databases and file systems. A B-tree node can contain multiple elements unlike a binary search tree. The elements in each B-tree node are stored in a partially filled array sorted from smallest to largest. A B-tree ensures that all leaves are at the same depth, avoiding imbalance.

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8 views

Balanced Trees

A B-tree is a tree data structure that keeps data sorted and allows efficient searches, insertions, and deletions. It is optimized for systems that read and write large blocks of data like databases and file systems. A B-tree node can contain multiple elements unlike a binary search tree. The elements in each B-tree node are stored in a partially filled array sorted from smallest to largest. A B-tree ensures that all leaves are at the same depth, avoiding imbalance.

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Introduction to B-Trees

A B-tree is a tree data structure that keeps data sorted and allows searches, insertions, and deletions in
logarithmic amortized time. Unlike self-balancing binary search trees, it is optimized for systems that read
and write large blocks of data. It is most commonly used in database and file systems.
The B-Tree Rules
Important properties of a B-tree:

 B-tree nodes have many more than two children.


 A B-tree node may contain more than just a single element.

The set formulation of the B-tree rules: Every B-tree depends on a positive constant integer called MINIMUM,
which is used to determine how many elements are held in a single node.

 Rule 1: The root can have as few as one element (or even no elements if it also has no children);
every other node has at least MINIMUM elements.
 Rule 2: The maximum number of elements in a node is twice the value of MINIMUM.
 Rule 3: The elements of each B-tree node are stored in a partially filled array, sorted from the
smallest element (at index 0) to the largest element (at the final used position of the array).
 Rule 4: The number of subtrees below a nonleaf node is always one more than the number of
elements in the node.
o Subtree 0, subtree 1, ...
 Rule 5: For any nonleaf node:

1. An element at index i is greater than all the elements in subtree number i of the node, and
2. An element at index i is less than all the elements in subtree number i + 1 of the node.
 Rule 6: Every leaf in a B-tree has the same depth. Thus it ensures that a B-tree avoids the problem of
a unbalanced tree.

A binary search tree has one value in each node and two subtrees.
This notion easily generalizes to an M-way search tree, which has
(M-1) values per node and M subtrees. M is called the degree of
the tree. A binary search tree, therefore, has degree 2.

In fact, it is not necessary for every node to contain exactly (M-1)


values and have exactly M subtrees. In an M-way subtree a node
can have anywhere from 1 to (M-1) values, and the number of
(non-empty) subtrees can range from 0 (for a leaf) to 1+(the
number of values). M is thus a fixed upper limit on how much data
can be stored in a node.

The values in a node are stored in ascending order, V1 < V2 < ...
Vk (k <= M-1) and the subtrees are placed between adjacent
values, with one additional subtree at each end. We can thus
associate with each value a `left' and `right' subtree, with the right
subtree of Vi being the same as the left subtree of V(i+1). All the
values in V1's left subtree are less than V1 ; all the values in Vk's
subtree are greater than Vk; and all the values in the subtree
between V(i) and V(i+1) are greater than V(i) and less than
V(i+1).

For example, here is a 3-way search tree:

In our examples it will be convenient to illustrate M-way trees


using a small value of M. But bear in mind that, in practice, M is
usually very large. Each node corresponds to a physical block on
disk, and M represents the maximum number of data items that
can be stored in a single block. M is maximized in order to
speedup processing: to move from one node to another involves
reading a block from disk - a very slow operation compared to
moving around a data structure stored in memory.

The algorithm for searching for a value in an M-way search tree is


the obvious generalization of the algorithm for searching in a
binary search tree. If we are searching for value X are and
currently at node consisting of values V1...Vk, there are four
possible cases that can arise:

1. If X < V1, recursively search for X in V1's left subtree.


2. If X > Vk, recursively search for X in Vk's right subtree.
3. If X=Vi, for some i, then we are done (X has been found).
4. the only remaining possibility is that, for some i, Vi < X <
V(i+1). In this case recursively search for X in the subtree
that is in between Vi and V(i+1).

A B-tree is an M-way search tree with two special properties:

1. It is perfectly balanced: every leaf node is at the same


depth.
2. Every node, except perhaps the root, is at least half-full,
i.e. contains M/2 or more values (of course, it cannot
contain more than M-1 values). The root may have any
number of values (1 to M-1).

The 3-way search tree above is clearly not a B-tree. Here is a 3-


way B-tree containing the same values:

And here is a 5-way B-tree (each node other than the root must
contain between 2 and 4 values):

In the descriptions of our algorithms, we assume that M is odd;


therefore each node (other than the root) must contains between
(M-1)/2 and M-1 values.

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