Hi, > some professor of mine who was in love with b-trees kept on talking > about b-trieve, and how terrrible (?) it was that they now belong to > pervasive or something like that.
Well, a B-tree is a classical data structure, while B-trieve is a library for managing structured indexed files (ISAM). This library (proprietary software) was very popular on the golden Netware years. The company was renamed Pervasive and built a relacional, sql-based, database server on top of the Btrieve libraries. Believe me, Btrieve was a pain to develop for. The API was very low-level, and it had to be that way as it was meant to be cross-language but had no object model to use (the old DOS days). It was very fast and reliable, but I won't miss it. :-) > it seemed as if b-trieve was somehow capable of storing data internally > as trees or something like that, but i haven't heard anything about it > for a while, so i guess it got a bit obsolete... Most databases availabe today (and during the latest decades also) use B-trees as a way for organizing indexes, and the simpler ones (like Btrieve itself, C-ISAM and others) used B-trees for storing the data also. When you create an index-organized table on some databases (like Oracle) you are telling the db engine to store the table as a B-tree. The B-tree is a kind of balaced tree (like plain binary trees) optimized for disk storage. []s, Fernando Lozano
