An Interesting Problem
You have the right to set the disk page size for the disk where a B-tree will reside.
Compute the optimum page size n assuming that
- The items are 4 bytes long and the pointers are also 4 bytes long.
- Time to read a node from disk is 12+.003n
- Time to process a block in memory is unimportant
- B+tree is full (I.e., every page has the maximum number of items and pointers)
What happens to the optimum n as the transfer time is reduced much more than the seek time ?