As mentioned in parts 1 and 2, having many disk seeks are bad (they slow down performance). Fractal tree data structures minimize disk seeks on ad-hoc insertions, whereas B-trees practically guarantee that disk seeks are performed on ad-hoc insertions. As a result, fractal tree data structures can insert data up to two orders of magnitude faster than B-Trees can.
In this post, let’s examine deletions, and get an intuitive understanding for why fractal-tree data structures exhibit the same two orders of magnitude faster deletions than B-trees. In MySQL 5.1, this advantage is really eye-popping for TokuDB v. InnoDB, because InnoDB does not use its insert buffer for deletions. I understand there is a delete buffer in 5.5, which I …
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