On B-Tree Indices for Skewed Distributions

It is often the case that the set of values over which a B-Tree is constructed has a skewed distribution. We present a geometric growth technique to manage postings records in such cases, and show that the performance of such a technique is better than that of a straightforward fixed length postings list: It guarantees 1 disk access on searching, and it takes a fraction of the space that its competitor requires (55% to 66%, in our experiments).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Christos Faloutsos, H. V. Jagadish
• Keywords: Database, Geometric Growth Technique, Skewed Distribution, Straightforward Fixed Length, VLDB 1992