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Optimistic Locking in B-Trees
B-Trees stand the test of time. In this article, we explore why we still use a 55 year old data structure: It is still super efficient on modern hardware when we use contention free optimistic lock coupling!
They are only one month younger than the idea of relational databases itself and witnessed the birth of multi-core architectures, complex cache hierarchies, fast network attached storage and many more groundbreaking changes. IMHO, B-Trees are in practice close enough to being cache oblivious, so they benefit greatly from hardware development of ever faster and growing memory without changes to the code. While especially in computer science, change is frequent, B-Trees are here to stay for several reasons: Their locality translated seamlessly from small disks to the caches we now have in modern systems.
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