CODEWITHSUNDEEP
data-structurestreebinary-treeavl-treeb-tree
Abhishek Satyavolu
Abhishek Satyavolu

Reputation: 79

A tree that is both memory efficient and disk-space efficient?

I recently started reading about Data Structures in detail. I came across trees. AVL trees are designed taking fast memory access into consideration and B trees are designed taking efficient disk storage into consideration. Suppose I want to design a tree which is both memory efficient and disk storage efficient, what tree should I use? Is there any way I can combine AVL tree and B Tree? Is there any other tree that can do both? Is this fundamentally possible in a real-world scenario?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 508

Answers (1)

Thomas C. G. de Vilhena
Thomas C. G. de Vilhena

Reputation: 14595

I want to design a tree which is both memory efficient and disk storage efficient (...) Is there any way I can combine AVL tree and B Tree?

Short answer is no, there isn't, unless you make a breakthrough discovery in the field of data structures. Both of them were designed with specific optimization requirements in mind, you can't have the best of both worlds.

There's a concept in computing called Space–time tradeoff which can be extended to other types of tradeoffs, like the one you're interested in. You can think of it like this: to improve a property of an already optimized algorithm you will have to worsen another (unless you discover some new approach no one thought before).

I suggest you take a look at the available implementations of optimized Binary Trees and start with the one that best fits your needs.

Upvotes: 1

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