B-Trees and Database Indexes

One thing I really appreciate from my Computer Science education was learning about B-Trees. I also had the rare opportunity in my first job after college to actually apply B-Trees in my work.

While I have no idea how any RDBMS actually works at a code level, having an understanding of B-Trees is useful for reasoning about what likely happens when a database like MySQL looks up data in a large table, and for appreciating the importance of well-designed indexes.

For that reason, I found this blog post on B-Trees and their use in databases a great read. It’s very well put together, including interactive visualizations that are helpful aids in understanding how this stuff works under the hood.