B-trees and database indexes
published on 2024/09/10
The B-tree plays a foundational role in many pieces of software, especially database management systems (DMBSs). MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Dynamo, and many others rely on B-trees to perform efficient data lookups via indexes. By the time you finish this article, you'll have learned how B-trees and B+trees work, why databases use them for indexes, and why using a UUID as your primary key might be a bad idea. You'll also have the opportunity to play with interactive animations of the data structures we discuss. Get ready to click buttons.
Computer science has a plethora of data structures to choose from for storing, searching, and managing data on a computer. The B-tree is one such structure, and is commonly used in database applications. B-trees store pairs of data known as keys and values in what computer programmers call a tree-like structure. For those not acquainted with how computer scientists use the term "tree" it actually looks more like a root system.