Home | Tribal Knowledge | Tribal-Glossary
B-Tree
A B-tree is a self-balancing tree data structure that maintains sorted data for efficient insertion, deletion, and lookup operations. B-trees are especially suited for storage systems that read and write large data blocks, such as databases and file systems. Each node in it contains several keys in sorted order. Each key separates the data range for the child nodes beneath it. The nodes can have more than two children, a significant difference from binary search trees. This makes them ideal for minimizing disk reads and writes. The properties of this structure type ensure that the tree remains balanced. All leaf nodes are at the same depth, and each node (except the root) is filled at least to a specific capacity, typically between 50% and 100%. This efficiency and balance make them very effective for managing large datasets where operations must minimize the number of disk accesses to speed up data retrieval and update times.