Adjusting B‐Tree for Better Usability: Nodes as Files Instead of Disk Blocks

B‐Tree is a well‐known indexing data structure for managing large persistent data. In its native form, it is used by database management systems and not humans. It is seen as a tree whose nodes are disk blocks. In this paper, an adjustment on B‐Tree is proposed to become easier to use for humans. This is done by relaxing the restriction that its node has to be a disk block. Instead, tree nodes are implemented as files. All B‐Tree algorithms were adjusted and implemented to adapt to this change. The main gain of this work is better usability of a B‐Tree for humans. Another gain is the complete freedom in setting the degree of the tree and the size of the data record. An experimental study was conducted to study how the performance of insertion and deletion changes with the degree of the tree t . It was found that the performance of the algorithms is very much affected by the number of levels of the tree. Very large values of t caused a degradation in performance. However, this degradation was found to be low compared with the change in t . This work opens the door for more research to enhance the usability of the B‐Tree: like supporting the adjusted B‐Tree with a GUI that makes it even easier to build and manipulate B‐Trees by a human.