alt Hacker NewsFTA:
> Skiplists to the rescue! Or rather, a weird thing we invented called a “skiptree”…
I can't help but wonder. The article makes no mention of b-trees if any kind. To me, this sounded like the obvious first step.
If their main requirement was to do sequential access to load data, and their problem was how to speed up tree traversal on an ad-hoc tree data structure that was too deep, then I wonder if their problem was simply having tree nodes with too few children. A B+ tree specifically sounds to be right on the nose for the task.
IIUC, the tree structure is the very thing they're trying to store and query -- it's not merely an artefact of a data structure that they're using to store something else (the way a B+ tree or binary tree used to store, say, a set of product names would be). If their tree has long paths, it has long paths.