Data Structures, Research Paper Example

A tree is a disjointed data structure that programmers mostly use to store data in a hierarchical structure. In this discussion, we examine two types of trees, B-tree and binary tree. A binary tree is a tree structure that has a firm computational characteristic that provides for an efficient operation. Programmers recognise a binary tree as a tree structure where each node can consist of two or more children. By assigning a minimum value of children to two, we can come up with programs for manipulating the data in a binary tree. A binary tree is balanced if it is not “heavy” on either sub-trees. There are three traversal algorithms available in a binary tree. These are sometimes referred to as preorder, inorder, and postorder traversal. Inorder is where the left sub-tree is visited first, then the node and the right sub-tree. Preorder is where the node is visited then the left sub-tree followed by the right sub-tree. For postorder, the left sub-tree followed by the right sub-tree and later the node is traversed (McMillan, 2007).

Unlike a binary tree structure, each node of a b-tree may consist of variable values of keys as well as children. B-tree is an efficient data structure, which is used to manipulate large amount of data for a faster access. A b-tree is normally used for column manipulations in expressions that employ the use of the =, ?, ?=, ?, operators. B-trees are used in databases such as Oracle. In addition, it is used in file-structures to enable faster random retrieval of an arbitrary block in a certain file (Alapati, 2008).

Hashing algorithm is a function that takes a variable string input and changes it into a constant numeric code. It is normally used in cryptography, fast data storage and error corrections cryptograms.

A hashing algorithm can cause problems if there are various strings with the same hash value. This is especially when there is a wider range of strings. To prevent these problems, a larger hash table should be provided (Biswas, 2006).

References

Alapati, S. R. (2008). Expert Oracle Database 11g Administration. New York: Apress.

McMillan, M. (2007). Data Structures And Algorithms Using C#. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biswas, K. (2006). Hash Table: A data structure to hold items for retrieval. Retrieved from www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/eel4851/summer06/hashing.pdf