What is the motivation for using B+trees and B-trees to access data items stored on a hard drive compared to 2-3 trees or AVL trees?

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

First, let's restate the problem to ensure clarity: the question asks why B+-trees and B-trees are preferred for data access on hard drives over 2-3 trees or AVL trees.
Option 1: 'They are better for random access than sequential access of items.' This is misleading. B-trees and their variants are designed to minimize disk I/O by broadening nodes, which reduces the number of disk seeks, but saying they are inherently better for random access than sequential access is an oversimplification. In practice, the access pattern (random vs sequential) matters less than the number of disk reads; both structures aim to reduce the number of disk accesses regardless of access pattern.
Option 2: 'They are more compact in memory size' While in-memory compactness can be advantageous, the primary motivation for B-trees is not memory footprint when data resides on disk. On disk, the dominant cost is disk I/O, not in-memory size, so this option misses the central rationale.
Option 3: 'They have faster insertion.' Insertion speed is not the main reason for their use on disks. B-trees optimize for minimizing disk I/O during searches, insertions, and deletions by keeping nodes large and balanced. In-memory insertion speed of AVL or 2-3 trees does not directly translate to disk-based efficiency; disk access patterns dominate performance, so this claim is not the core justification.
Option 4: 'The high branching factor results in fewer expensive disk accesses.' This statement targets the key architectural advantage: by having many keys per node (high branching factor), the height of the tree is kept low, which means that fewer nodes must be read from disk during operations. Since disk I/O is costly, reducing the number of accesses is the primary performance driver for using B+ and B trees on disk-backed storage. This aligns with the established rationale for these data structures in database and file-system contexts.
Thus, option 4 correctly identifies the main motivation: reducing the number of expensive disk accesses through a high branching factor, which lowers tree height and improves I/O efficiency.

XLMC0202501 Topic 17 Quiz

What is the motivation for using B+trees and B-trees to access data items stored on a hard drive compared to 2-3 trees or AVL trees?

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