Re: Fractal Tree Indexing over B-Trees?

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 10:44:03PM +0200, Niels de Carpentier wrote:

quoted

You are still going to have to have at least 29 levels to accomodate 1
billion
objects, though they won't all be full (sorry I missed the must be full or
empty
bit).  So it looks like we'll have to actually search what 13 rows right?
So
still more rows than a b-tree, and again you are talking about binary
searching
each row's blocks and then following its forward pointer down to the next
one,
so maybe not 100's of times slower than a b-tree, but we're not talking
about a
5-10% difference either, probably still measured in multiples.

They say that they can do the block pointers in a way that limits the
number for searches per row to a constant, so it's not that bad. They do
less random seeks, but bigger ones at the cost of more cpu usage.

I'd like to see how they do that.  The fact is you are still going to get random
seeks since you have to binary search the blocks in an entire row since there is
no way you can read a several thousand block row into memory to search it, so
once your rows get pretty big you are doing just as much if not more random io
as a btree.

quoted

Hah my math was a little off I'll grant you but the basic idea still
stands,
once we start getting into larger and larger rows we're going to have to
binary
search just to find the right _block_ to use, which in my mind is much
more of a
problem than having to binary search inside of multiple blocks.  At the
very
least as the number of objects grows the time it takes to find something
in the
tree increases exponentially.

That's not what they say. A lot of info is missing though.

quoted

quoted

There's a *ton* of detail that they don't describe about how to actually
translate the logical notion of power-of-two node sizes into coherent
block IO that scales.  I don't doubt that it's possible.

I imagine there is, but based on what little information they've shown I
don't
see how it's a hands down win against b-trees.  If anything we're talking
about
having to solve really complex problems in order to get any sort of good
performance out of this thing.  Thanks,

They don't claim to win hands down for the search case, they say they are
similar for the search case, but much better at inserts.

I don't think it's good for the linux fs general use case, but it's not as
bad as you think. But it will be very hard to implement anyway unless they
release more details.

I don't buy that its better in the insert case either for similar reasons, you
are talking about having to rewrite entire rows to maintain the sequential
nature of everything, so if you end up adding a giant row you have to go and
write the whole thing out again, so you are talking about a lot more IO than
with b-trees, albeit sequential.  So maybe it's a win since it's sequential but
I wonder at what tree size that benefit no longer exists.

Of course all this analysis is based on a power point presentation and there may
be some detail I'm missing, but that's mostly my point, claiming that b-trees
are now obsolete because we can maybe do inserts faster is just idiotic.
Thanks,

Josef