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B-Trees Require Fewer Comparisons Than Balanced Binary Search Trees
A blog by and for database architects.
Assuming we store n elements in a binary search tree, the lower bound for the number of comparisons is log 2 n in the worst case. One intuition for this result is that for larger k values, B-trees become increasingly similar to sorted arrays which achieve the log 2 n lower bound. Practical B-trees often use fairly large values of k(e.g., 100) and therefore offer tight bounds -- in addition to being more cache-friendly than binary search trees.
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