B***-tree: a family of efficient data packaging multiway trees

Presents the B***-tree, a data organization method which improves the storage utilization of the conventional B*-tree by 20%-50%. The B***-tree uses a special node data structure that eliminates some of the I/O overhead incurred during building the index. Moreover, an adaptation of the B***-tree in distributed memory multiprocessors is discussed. This structure guarantees 100% storage utilization, and incurs a tolerable message passing overhead, solely dependent on the branching factor of the tree.<>