Strange Loop

Modern B-Tree techniques

B-Trees are probably the most important access structures in databases and file systems, and everyone knows basic ideas about how B-Tree work. But after reading a few white papers about this topic it turns out that these "basics" are about 40 years old. Over the years so many techniques were proposed in order to improve efficiency in one cases, add functionality in others or even embrace new types of hardware.

Inspired by Goetz Graefes and many other authors, we will go through the most interesting of such techniques, see why they are so cool, what kind of use cases they address and how many of them did land in PostgreSQL or other databases.

Dmitrii Dolgov

PostgreSQL contributor, Software Engineer

PostgreSQL contributor, Software Engineer