Question

I heard that B-Tree databases are faster than Hash tables, so I thought of using a B-Tree database for my project. Is there any existing framework in python which allows us to use such Data structure or will I have to code from scratch?

Answer 1

The only reason to choose a B-Tree over a hash table, either in memory or with block storage (as in a database) is to support queries other than equal. A b-tree permits you perform range queries with good performance. Many key-value stores (such as berkley db) don’t make this externally visible, though, because they still hash the keys, but this still lets you iterate over the whole dataset quickly and stably (iterators remain valid even if there are adds or deletes, or the tree must be rebalanced).

If you don’t need range queries, and you don’t need concurrent iteration, then you don’t need b-trees, use a hash table, it will be faster at any scale.

Edit: I’ve had occasion for the above to actually be true; for this, the blist package seems to be the most complete implementation of a sorted container library.