Organization and maintenance of large ordered indexes

Summary

Organization and maintenance of an index for a dynamic random access file is considered. It is assumed that the index must be kept on some pseudo random access backup store like a disc or a drum. The index organization described allows retrieval, insertion, and deletion of keys in time proportional to log_k I where I is the size of the index and k is a device dependent natural number such that the performance of the scheme becomes near optimal. Storage utilization is at least 50% but generally much higher. The pages of the index are organized in a special datastructure, so-called B-trees. The scheme is analyzed, performance bounds are obtained, and a near optimal k is computed. Experiments have been performed with indexes up to 100000 keys. An index of size 15000 (100000) can be maintained with an average of 9 (at least 4) transactions per second on an IBM 360/44 with a 2311 disc.