Latest / Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp
A Map Drawn with an Old Alphabet: B-Trees and B+ Trees as Data Structures
On a Sunday in Bristol, database consultant Wren Halloway learns that a veterinary chain's receptionist cannot find Mrs de Souza or Mr O'Brien-Hart, though both are in the table. In part six of The Deep End's Data Structures series we find out why: a B-tree is a map drawn with an alphabet, and an operating system upgrade quietly changed the alphabet. Along the way we split nodes by ear, learn why fifty million rows need only three levels, see random UUIDs scatter inserts across a clustered index, let readers slide past splits on Lehman and Yao's sideways links, flip a single root pointer for…
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