I'm talking outside my area of expertise here, so don't take this as guaranteed: B+ When a leaf block is full it splits and half the contents will be moved to the new leaf. (In fact Steve Adams has demonstrated that Oracle tries to optimise branch packing by being a little flexible on the split). B* When a leaf block is full, you scan the two adjacent leaf blocks to see if you can migrate one entry into them. If this is not possible, you split two buckets into three. (I don't know how you choose whether to split the left or right neighbour). B+ can run down to 50% efficiency on random inserts, whereas B+ can only go down to 67%. B* has to do more work more often on inserts. (In Oracle's case it might also be much more expensive when dealing with read-consistent queries). Regards Jonathan Lewis http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk The educated person is not the person who can answer the questions, but the person who can question the answers -- T. Schick Jr Next public appearances: March 2004 Hotsos Symposium - The Burden of Proof March 2004 Charlotte NC OUG - CBO Tutorial April 2004 Iceland One-day tutorials: http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/tutorial.html Three-day seminar: see http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/seminar.html ____UK___February ____UK___June The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html ----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Hanks" <hanksdc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, February 06, 2004 8:08 PM Subject: B+Tree vs. B*Tree This may be a little off-topic, but, what are the differences between B+tree indexes, and B*tree indexes? At school I had to write a program to perform insert and update on a B+tree index, so I'm familiar with that type of index. Searching for B*tree on Google is less than effective as Google strips out the * character. Any docs you could point me to would be helpful. I have the Silberschatz book mentioned previously today, which covers B-tree, and B+tree indexes, but not b*tree indexes. Thanks, -- Dan ======================================================================== Daniel Hanks - Systems/Database Administrator About Inc., Web Services Division ======================================================================== ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------