On B-tree Indices for Skewed Distributions

Summary: Geometric growth for postings in B-tree indices under skewed distributions. Achieves 1-disk-access searches and uses 55–66% of the space of fixed-length postings lists, outperforming straightforward approaches. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 8084
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1992
Pagerank: 0.00018798677
Overall Rank: 638 | 95.57%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christos Faloutsos
2. H. V. Jagadish

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
327	Balancing Histogram Optimality and Practicality for Query Result Size Estimation	1995	SIGMOD	0.00027308479
1,114	Beyond Uniformity and Independence : Analysis of R-trees Using the Concept of Fractal Dimension	1994	PODS	0.00013901031
1,154	Fast Incremental Indexing for Full-Text Information Retrieval	1994	VLDB	0.00013642184
1,517	Incremental Updates of Inverted Lists for Text Document Retrieval	1994	SIGMOD	0.00011578859
2,292	The Rufus System: Information Organization for Semi-Structured Data	1993	VLDB	9.0904272e-05
2,732	Efficiently Searching In-Memory Sorted Arrays: Revenge of the Interpolation Search?	2019	SIGMOD	8.2087602e-05
4,177	Density Biased Sampling: An Improved Method for Data Mining and Clustering	2000	SIGMOD	6.3835403e-05
5,532	A Padded Encoding Scheme to Accelerate Scans by Leveraging Skew	2015	SIGMOD	5.4548897e-05
5,982	Modeling skewed distributions using multifractals and the '80-20 law'	1996	VLDB	5.2446136e-05
6,307	Wave-Indices: Indexing Evolving Databases	1997	SIGMOD	5.1175603e-05
6,697	The TEXTURE Benchmark: Measuring Performance of Text Queries on a Relational DBMS	2005	VLDB	4.9577992e-05
9,123	External Merge Sort for Top-K Queries: Eager input filtering guided by histograms	2020	SIGMOD	4.3920263e-05
12,502	Trustworthy Keyword Search for Regulatory-Compliant Records Retention	2006	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
99	On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results	1991	SIGMOD	0.00050022914

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,480	Efficient Search of Multidimensional B-Trees	1995	VLDB	5.0475112e-05
4,324	Compact B-Trees	1979	SIGMOD	6.2885419e-05
1,913	BF-Tree: Approximate Tree Indexing	2014	VLDB	0.00010113937
5,098	Multi-Disk B-trees	1991	SIGMOD	5.7007294e-05
9,404	Revisiting B-tree Compression: An Experimental Study	2024	SIGMOD	4.3441378e-05
14,348	Multi-Table Search For B-Tree Files	1979	SIGMOD	-
10,368	B-Trees Are Back: Engineering Fast and Pageable Node Layouts	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
13,073	Experiments With B-Tree Reorganization	1980	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
8,183	Two is Better Than One: The Case for 2-Tree for Skewed Data Sets	2023	CIDR	4.5658208e-05
4,672	A General Solution of the n-dimensional B-tree Problem	1995	SIGMOD	6.0085156e-05