VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
The image below helps show the differences between B+ trees and B trees.
Advantages of B+ trees:
- Because B+ trees don’t have data associated with interior nodes, more keys can fit on a page of memory. Therefore, it will require fewer cache misses in order to access data that is on a leaf node.
- The leaf nodes of B+ trees are linked, so doing a full scan of all objects in a tree requires just one linear pass through all the leaf nodes. A B tree, on the other hand, would require a traversal of every level in the tree. This full-tree traversal will likely involve more cache misses than the linear traversal of B+ leaves.
Advantage of B trees:
- Because B trees contain data with each key, frequently accessed nodes can lie closer to the root, and therefore can be accessed more quickly.
