On Sun, 12 Nov 1995 01:04:07 GMT James Herod said:
>In article <[log in to unmask]>,
>Bruce Toback  <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>Tad Bochan writes:
>>>I am looking for a book or some reference on techniques for efficient
>>>indexing of a LARGE number of keys of variable length.
>>
>>There are a number of variations on the B-tree theme that are better for
>>different kinds of applications.
>
>To add to what Bruce said, go to your local college or university that
>has a computer science department, and peruse the bookstore looking for
>books on algorithms and data structures.  You will want to examine the
>candidates for their treatment of (besides B-trees) AVL trees, balanced
>B-trees (B*-trees) and other arcana.
 
Again, the nature of your application and the distribution of your keys
both in content and in length can lead to different solutions.  Balanced
b-trees as mentioned above optimize retrieval at the cost of adding new
nodes to the tree.  And if you need sequential access to the data, you
should build a threaded b-tree (one of my favorites) for warp-speed
sequential retrieval.
 
[\] Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>