Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Java

B-Trees

Just as AVL trees are balanced binary search trees, B-trees are balanced M-way search trees. By imposing a balance condition , the shape of an AVL tree is constrained in a way which guarantees that the search, insertion, and withdrawal operations are all , where n is the number of items in the tree. The shapes of B-Trees are constrained for the same reasons and with the same effect.

Definition (B-Tree) A B-Tree of order M is either the empty tree or it is an M-way search tree T with the following properties:
The root of T has at least two subtrees and at most M subtrees.
All internal nodes of T (other than its root) have between and M subtrees.
All external nodes of T are at the same level.

A B-tree of order one is clearly impossible. Hence, B-trees of order M are really only defined for . However, in practice we expect that M is large for the same reasons that motivate M-way search trees--large databases in secondary storage.

Figure gives an example of a B-tree of order M=3. By Definition , the root of a B-tree of order three has either two or three subtrees and the internal nodes also have either two or three subtrees. Furthermore, all the external nodes, which are shown as small boxes in Figure , are at the same level.

Figure: A B-tree of order 3.

It turns out that the balance conditions imposed by Definition are good in the same sense as the AVL balance conditions. That is, the balance condition guarantees that the height of B-trees is logarithmic in the number of keys in the tree and the time required for insertion and deletion operations remains proportional to the height of the tree even when balancing is required.

Theorem The minimum number of keys in a B-tree of order and height is .

extbfProof Clearly, a B-tree of height zero contains at least one node. Consider a B-tree order M and height h>0. By Definition , each internal node (except the root) has at least subtrees. This implies the minimum number of keys contained in an internal node is . The minimum number of keys a level zero is 1; at level one, ; at level two, ; at level three, ; and so on.

Therefore the minimum number of keys in a B-tree of height h>0 is given by the summation

eqnarray21080

A corollary of Theorem is that the height, h, of a B-tree containing n keys is given by

Thus, we have shown that a B-tree satisfies the first criterion of a good balance condition--the height of B-tree with n internal nodes is . What remains to be shown is that the balance condition can be efficiently maintained during insertion and withdrawal operations. To see that it can, we need to look at an implementation.