Array-based Cache Conscious Trees

Making effective use of cache can give good performance. In this paper, Array-Based Cache conscious trees (ABC trees for short) are proposed for realizing good performance of not only search operation but also update operation. The logical structure and manipulation of an ABC tree are similar to those of a B+-tree. The initial space of an array for an ABC tree as it is supposed to be a complete tree is allocated. This allows the tree to have contiguous memory space for its core and to reduce the number of pointers in it. As a result, the key capacity of a node increases and we can make effective use of cache. We also present an enhancement of ABC trees, which can increase the capacity of an ABC tree with overflow nodes. We describe how we can decide whether to create an overflow node when a node overflows for performance. Some experimental studies show that ABC trees can give good performance of operations under certain conditions.