My understanding is that one of the key features of a B-Tree (and a B+Tree) is that it is designed such that the size of its nodes are some multiple of the block size of whatever media the data is stored on.Considering that, in a memory managed language like java/c#, we don't really have access to how, when and what order, data is accessed from the drive... can we still predictably benefit from the major advantage of this data structure?
Do you get the benefits of a B-Tree in a managed language?
data structures;binary tree;managed code
Yes, B-Trees still make good sense in managed languages.A few points of explanation:If you're using the B-Tree as an on-disk data structure, then I can absolutely guarantee that disk IO will be your bottleneck, not the fact that you are using a managed language.If you are using a B-Tree in memory, then you can still have considerable control over memory layout from a caching perspective. For example, you can use large arrays for data storage in Java/C# and store tree nodes/data in the arrays using offsets rather than having a separate object to represent each tree node. The advantages of a data structure are largely independent of language, at least up to a constant % factor. So if a B-Tree makes sense for your algorithm / access pattern, it will probably do so regardless of what language you are using.On top of all that, it is generally the case that Java/C# can be nearly as fast as C/C++ if well optimised. 