B-tree
Árbol-B
- Date
- 1970 · confidence high
- Place
- Boeing Research Labs, Seattle, Washington, United States
- Credited to
- Rudolf Bayer and Edward M. McCreight
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
At Boeing, Bayer and McCreight designed a balanced index structure for random-access files too large to fit in memory, one that reduces tree height and groups data into few disk blocks.
Wikidata dates the item to 1972; the original paper, "Organization and maintenance of large ordered indices," circulated in July 1970.
What it led to
- Standard indexing in relational databases
- Modern filesystems built on B-trees (NTFS, ext4, Btrfs)