B-tree
B-tree
[′bē ‚trē]B-tree
(algorithm)The "B" in B-tree has never been officially defined. It couldstand for "balanced" or "Bayer", after one of the originaldesigners of the algorithms and structure. A B-tree is _not_(necessarily?) a "binary tree".
A B+-tree (as used by IBM's VSAM) is a B-tree where theleaves are also linked sequentially, thus allowing both fastrandom access and sequential access to data.
[Knuth's Art of Computer Programming].
B-tree
(Balanced-tree) A technique for organizing indexes. In order to keep access time to a minimum, B-tree stores the data keys in a balanced hierarchy that continually realigns itself as items are inserted and deleted. Thus, all nodes always have a similar number of keys.B+tree is a version of B-tree that maintains a hierarchy of indexes while also linking the data sequentially, providing fast direct access and fast sequential access. The IBM mainframe VSAM access method uses the B-tree method. See Btrfs and VSAM.