Optimistic Locking in B-Trees

To B or not to B: B-Trees with Optimistic Lock Coupling B-Trees are one of the few specialized data structures which truly stood the test of time, being over 50 years old. They were invented in year zero of unix time, on a system with a whopping 7.25MB of disk storage — Not DRAM! 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. However, while most technologies would show their age and can comfortably retire, B-Trees are still ubiquitous for data storage. Old but gold Many of the tried and true file and database systems use B-Trees, and new systems conduct research on them. In this blog post, we explore why I consider B-Trees the most practical data structure, and why they are an excellent data structure for modern hardware although predating modern hardware by decades. CedarDB uses B-Trees as its main data st ... Read full article.