B-Tree Nodes

[bnewman]

A soulful country ballad about database internals.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "(Take Me Home) Country Roads" by John Denver, Taffy Nivert, and Bill Danoff

listen to this song

/: C - Am - / G - F C :/

 

Data warehouse, SQL server

Rows of data, how to keep 'em in there?

Keep 'em ordered, index them in trees

Sorting them is simple, finding them's a breeze

 

/ C - G - / Am - F - / 1st / F - C - /

 

B-tree nodes, store those rows

In the place they belong

Keep the data in sorted order

Store those rows, B-tree nodes

 

All her memory's gathered into

Blocks of records, short arrays of pointers

All those pointers fan out from a root

Like thumbing through an index, it's easy to compute

 

B-tree nodes, store those rows

In the place they belong

Keep the data in sorted order

Store those rows, B-tree nodes

 

/ Am G C Am / F C G - / Am Bb F Am / G - G7 - /

 

I hear a voice, in the mornin' hour it calls me

The operations center says the app won't display

And looking at the code I see a query

That should have returned yesterday, yesterday

 

B-tree nodes, store those rows

In the place they belong

Keep the data in sorted order

Store those rows, B-tree nodes