Why are Red_Black trees better than 2-3 trees?

2
votes

Apart from red-blacks being easier to implement.

All operations (insertion, deletion, lookup) seem to have a time complexity of O(log n), in both trees. Is there a certain difference between these operations that I'm missing?

If you google search "red-black" "2-3 tree", you don't find any comparison between the two..

I've come to understand that red-blacks are generally considered to be the best. (I've heard that one of the reasons [EDIT] why red-blacks are faster than AVL trees (same category)[/EDIT] is efficiency in "application to persistent data structures", because of rebalancing efficiency; but that doesn't answer my question..)

2
performancetreebinary-treered-black-treeoperation

2 Answers

2
votes

I'm not familiar with 2-3 trees, but I am pretty sure that B-Trees are by far the preferred for persistent database/filesystems. Red/Black more often used in memory

1
votes

Straight from the Wikipedia entry for B-Trees (of which the 2 3 tree is a type of):

Unlike self-balancing binary search trees, the B-tree is optimized for systems that read and write large blocks of data. It is commonly used in databases and filesystems.