Lecture Index Structures

Rashmi Dutta Baruah

Department of Computer Science & Engineering
 Outline
• Basic Concepts
• Ordered Indices
• B+-Tree Index Files

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 Basic Concepts
Select * from instructor
where salary = 50000

Indexing

Figure source:
http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cheung/Courses/554/Syllabu
s/3-index/intro3.html
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 Basic Concepts
• Indexing mechanisms used to speed up access to
desired data.
• Search Key - attribute or set of attributes used to
look up records in a file.
• An index file consists of records (called index
entries) of the form
search-key pointer

• Index files are typically much smaller than the

original file
• Two basic kinds of indices:
– Ordered indices: search keys are stored in sorted order
– Hash indices: search keys are distributed uniformly
across “buckets” using a “hash function”.

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 Index Evaluation Metrics
• Access types supported efficiently. E.g.,
– Records with a specified value in the attribute
– Records with an attribute value falling in a specified range
of values.
• Access time – time to find a particular data item or
set of items
• Insertion time – time to find the correct place to
insert + time to update the index structure
• Deletion time – time to find the item to be deleted +
time to update the index structure
• Space overhead- additional space occupied the index
structure

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 Ordered Indices
• In an ordered index, index entries are stored sorted
on the search key value.
• Clustered index: in a sequentially ordered file, the
index whose search key specifies the sequential
order of the file.
– Also called primary index
– The search key of a primary index is usually but not
necessarily the primary key.
• Secondary index: an index whose search key
specifies an order different from the sequential
order of the file. Also called non-clustered index.
• Index-sequential file: sequential file ordered on a
search key, with a clustered index on the search
key.

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 source: http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cheung/Courses/554/Syllabus/3-
index/intro3.html

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 Dense Index Files
• Dense index — Index record appears for every
search-key value in the file.
• E.g. index on ID attribute of instructor relation

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 Dense Index Files (Cont.)
• Dense index on dept_name, with instructor file
sorted on dept_name

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 Sparse Index Files
• Sparse Index: contains index records for only some
search-key values.
– Applicable when records are sequentially ordered on search-
key
• To locate a record with search-key value K we:
– Find index record with largest search-key value < K
– Search file sequentially starting at the record to which the
index record points

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 Sparse Index Files (Cont.)
• Compared to dense indices:
– Less space and less maintenance overhead for insertions and
deletions.
– Generally slower than dense index for locating records.
• Tradeoff:
– for clustered index: sparse index with an index entry for every block in
file, corresponding to least search-key value in the block.

– For unclustered index: sparse index on top of dense index (multilevel

index)
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 Multilevel Index
• If index does not fit in memory, access becomes
expensive.
• Solution: treat index kept on disk as a sequential
file and construct a sparse index on it.
– outer index – a sparse index of the basic index
– inner index – the basic index file
• If even outer index is too large to fit in main
memory, yet another level of index can be
created, and so on.
• Indices at all levels must be updated on insertion
or deletion from the file.
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 Multilevel Index (Cont.)

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 Secondary Indices Example
▪ Secondary index on salary field of instructor

▪ Index record points to a bucket that contains pointers to all the

actual records with that particular search-key value.
▪ Secondary indices have to be dense

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 Indices on Multiple Keys
• Composite search key
– E.g., index on instructor relation on attributes (name,
ID)
– Values are sorted lexicographically
• E.g. (John, 12121) < (John, 13514) and
(John, 13514) < (Peter, 11223)
– Can query on just name, or on (name, ID)

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 Clustering vs Nonclustering Indices
• Indices offer substantial benefits when searching for
records.
• BUT: indices imposes overhead on database
modification
– when a record is inserted or deleted, every index on
the relation must be updated
– When a record is updated, any index on an updated
attribute must be updated

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 Index Update: Deletion

▪ If deleted record was the

only record in the file with
its particular search-key
value, the search-key is
deleted from the index
also.

• Single-level index entry deletion:

– Dense indices – deletion of search-key is similar to
file record deletion.
– Sparse indices –
• if an entry for the search key exists in the index, it is deleted
by replacing the entry in the index with the next search-key
value in the file (in search-key order).
• If the next search-key value already has an index entry, the
entry is deleted instead of being replaced.
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 Index Update: Insertion
• Single-level index insertion:
– Perform a lookup using the search-key value of the record
to be inserted.
– Dense indices – if the search-key value does not appear in
the index, insert it
• Indices are maintained as sequential files
• Need to create space for new entry, overflow blocks may be
required
– Sparse indices – if index stores an entry for each block of
the file, no change needs to be made to the index unless a
new block is created.
• If a new block is created, the first search-key value appearing in
the new block is inserted into the index.
• Multilevel insertion and deletion: algorithms are
simple extensions of the single-level algorithms
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 Recap

• We discussed ordered indices so far.

Dense
Primary
(Clustered)
Sparse
Ordered

Secondary
Dense
Index Structures (Non-clustered)

This we will
Hash discuss in the
next lecture.

Courtesy: some of the slides are take from lecture slides available at:
https://www.db-book.com/ and http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~dbbook/index.html
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 B+-Tree Index Files
• Disadvantage of indexed-sequential files
– Performance degrades as file grows, since many overflow
blocks get created.
– Periodic reorganization of entire file is required.
• Advantage of B+-tree index files:
– Automatically reorganizes itself with small, local, changes,
in the face of insertions and deletions.
– Reorganization of entire file is not required to maintain
performance.
• (Minor) disadvantage of B+-trees:
– Extra insertion and deletion overhead, space overhead.
• Advantages of B+-trees outweigh disadvantages
– B+-trees are used extensively
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 Example of B+-Tree

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 B+-Tree Index Files (Cont.)
:
• A B+-tree is a rooted tree satisfying the
following properties
– All paths from root to leaf are of the same length
– Each node that is not a root or a leaf has between
n/2 and n children.
– A leaf node has between (n–1)/2 and n–1 values
• Special cases:
– If the root is not a leaf, it has at least 2 children.
– If the root is a leaf (that is, there are no other
nodes in the tree), it can have between 0 and (n–1)
values.

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 B+-Tree Node Structure
• Typical node

– Ki are the search-key values

– Pi are pointers to children (for non-leaf nodes) or
pointers to records or buckets of records (for leaf
nodes).
• The search-keys in a node are ordered
K1 < K2 < K3 < . . . < Kn–1

(Initially assume no duplicate keys, address

duplicates later)
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 Leaf Nodes in B+-Trees
• Properties of a leaf node:
– For i = 1, 2, . . ., n–1, pointer Pi points to a file record with
search-key value Ki,
– If Li, Lj are leaf nodes and i < j, Li’s search-key values are less
than or equal to Lj’s search-key values
– Pn points to next leaf node in search-key order

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 Non-Leaf Nodes in B+-Trees
• Non leaf nodes form a multi-level sparse index on
the leaf nodes. For a non-leaf node with n
pointers:
– All the search-keys in the subtree to which P1 points
are less than K1
– For 2  i  n – 1, all the search-keys in the subtree to
which Pi points have values greater than or equal to Ki–
1 and less than Ki
– All the search-keys in the subtree to which Pn points
have values greater than or equal to Kn–1
– General structure

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 Example of B+-tree
• B+-tree for instructor file (n = 6)
• Leaf nodes must have between 3 and 5 values
((n–1)/2 and n –1, with n = 6).
• Non-leaf nodes other than root must have
between 3 and 6 children ((n/2 and n with n
=6).
• Root must have at least 2 children.

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 Observations about B+-trees
• Since the inter-node connections are done by pointers,
“logically” close blocks need not be “physically” close.

• The non-leaf levels of the B+-tree form a hierarchy of

sparse indices.

• The B+-tree contains a relatively small number of levels

• Level below root has at least 2* n/2 values
• Next level has at least 2* n/2 * n/2 values
• .. etc.
– If there are K search-key values in the file, the tree height is no
more than  logn/2(K)
– thus searches can be conducted efficiently.

• Insertions and deletions to the main file can be handled

efficiently, as the index can be restructured in logarithmic
time (as we shall see).
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 Queries on B+-Trees
function find(v)
1. C=root
2. while (C is not a leaf node)
1. Let i be least number s.t. V  Ki.
2. if there is no such number i then
3. Set C = last non-null pointer in C
4. else if (v = C.Ki ) Set C = Pi +1
5. else set C = C.Pi
3. if for some i, Ki = V then return C.Pi
4. else return null /* no record with search-key value v exists. */

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 Queries on B+-Trees (Cont.)
• Range queries find all records with search key values in
a given range- function findRange(lb, ub)
– first traverse to a leaf using find(lb)
(the leaf may or may not actually contain value lb)
– step through records in that and subsequent leaf nodes
collecting pointers to all records with key values C.Ki s.t.
lb<= C.Ki<=ub .
– stop when C.Ki > ub, or there are no more keys in the
tree.

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 Queries on B+-Trees (Cont.)
• If there are K search-key values in the file, the height
of the tree is no more than logn/2(K).
• A node is generally the same size as a disk block,
typically 4 kilobytes
– and n is typically around 100 (40 bytes per index entry).
• With 1 million search key values and n = 100
– at most log50(1,000,000) = 4 nodes are accessed in a
lookup traversal from root to leaf.
• Contrast this with a balanced binary tree with 1
million search key values — around 20 nodes are
accessed in a lookup
– above difference is significant since every node access may
need a disk I/O, costing around 20 milliseconds

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 Non-Unique Keys
• If a search key ai is not unique, create instead an
index on a composite key (ai , Ap), which is unique
– Ap could be a primary key, record ID, or any other
attribute that guarantees uniqueness
• Search for ai = v can be implemented by a range
search on composite key, with range (v, - ∞) to (v,
+ ∞), - ∞ and + ∞ denote the smallest and the
largest value of Ap
• But more I/O operations are needed to fetch the
actual records
– If the index is clustering, all accesses are sequential
– If the index is non-clustering, each record access may
need an I/O operation
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 Updates on B+-Trees: Insertion
Assume record already added to the file. Let
pr be pointer to the record, and let
v be the search key value of the record
1. Find the leaf node in which the search-key value
would appear
1. If there is room in the leaf node, insert (v, pr) pair in
the leaf node
2. Otherwise, split the node (along with the new (v, pr)
entry) as discussed in the next slide, and propagate
updates to parent nodes.

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Updates on B+-Trees: Insertion (Cont.)
• Splitting a leaf node:
– take the n (search-key value, pointer) pairs (including the
one being inserted) in sorted order. Place the first n/2 in
the original node, and the rest in a new node.
– let the new node be p, and let k be the least key value in p.
Insert (k,p) in the parent of the node being split.
– If the parent is full, split it and propagate the split further
up.
• Splitting of nodes proceeds upwards till a node that
is not full is found.
– In the worst case the root node may be split increasing the
height of the tree by 1.

Result of splitting node containing Brandt, Califieri and Crick on inserting Adams
Next step: insert entry with (Califieri, pointer-to-new-node) into parent
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 B+-Tree Insertion

Affected nodes

B+-Tree before and after insertion of “Adams”

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 B+-Tree Insertion

B+-Tree before and after insertion of “Lamport”

Affected nodes

2/3/2021 Affected
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 Insertion in B+-Trees (Cont.)
• Splitting a non-leaf node: when inserting (k,p) into an
already full internal node N
– Copy N to an in-memory area M with space for n+1 pointers and
n keys
– Insert (k,p) into M
– Copy P1,K1, …, K n/2-1,P n/2 from M back into node N
– Copy Pn/2+1,K n/2+1,…,Kn,Pn+1 from M into newly allocated node
N'
– Insert (K n/2,N') into parent N
• Example

• Read pseudocode in book!

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 Examples of B+-Tree Deletion

Before and after deleting “Srinivasan”

Affected nodes

• Deleting “Srinivasan” causes merging of under-full leaves

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 Examples of B+-Tree Deletion (Cont.)

Before and after deleting “Singh” and “Wu”

Affected nodes

• Leaf containing Singh and Wu became underfull, and borrowed a value Kim
from its left sibling
• Search-key value in the parent changes as a result
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 Example of B+-tree Deletion (Cont.)

Before and after deletion of “Gold”

• Node with Gold and Katz became underfull, and was merged with
its sibling
• Parent node becomes underfull, and is merged with its sibling
– Value separating two nodes (at the parent) is pulled down when merging
• Root node then has only one
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245 and is deleted 39
 Updates on B+-Trees: Deletion
Assume record already deleted from file. Let V be the search
key value of the record, and Pr be the pointer to the record.
• Remove (Pr, V) from the leaf node
• If the node has too few entries due to the removal, and
the entries in the node and a sibling fit into a single node,
then merge siblings:
– Insert all the search-key values in the two nodes into a single
node (the one on the left), and delete the other node.
– Delete the pair (Ki–1, Pi), where Pi is the pointer to the deleted
node, from its parent, recursively using the above procedure.

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 Updates on B+-Trees: Deletion
• Otherwise, if the node has too few entries due to the
removal, but the entries in the node and a sibling do
not fit into a single node, then redistribute pointers:
– Redistribute the pointers between the node and a sibling
such that both have more than the minimum number of
entries.
– Update the corresponding search-key value in the parent of
the node.
• The node deletions may cascade upwards till a node
which has n/2 or more pointers is found.
• If the root node has only one pointer after deletion,
it is deleted and the sole child becomes the root.

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 Complexity of Updates
• Cost (in terms of number of I/O operations) of
insertion and deletion of a single entry
proportional to height of the tree
– With K entries and maximum fanout of n, worst case
complexity of insert/delete of an entry is O(logn/2(K))
• In practice, number of I/O operations is less:
– Internal nodes tend to be in buffer
– Splits/merges are rare, most insert/delete operations
only affect a leaf node
• Average node occupancy depends on insertion
order
– 2/3rds with random, ½ with insertion in sorted order

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 Summary

• We discussed
– B+ tree index that takes the form of a balanced tree, in
which every path from the root of the tree to a leaf of the
tree is of the same length.
– lookup, insertion, and deletion in B+ tree index.
– lookup on B+ trees is straightforward and efficient,
insertion and deletion are complex but efficient.
– the number of I/O operations required is proportional to
the height of the tree.

Courtesy: The slides are take from lecture slides available at:
https://www.db-book.com/ and http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~dbbook/index.html
2/3/2021 CS 245 43