The Case for Learned Index Structures, Part 1: B-Trees

Jeff Dean and his collaborators at Google are turning the machine learning world upside down (again) with a recent paper about how machine learning models can be used as surprisingly effective substitutes for classic data structures. In this first part of a two-part series, we'll go through a data structure called b-trees. The structural form of b-trees make them efficient for searching, but if you squint at a b-tree and look at it a little bit sideways then the search functionality starts to look a little bit like a regression model--hence the relevance of machine learning models. If this sounds kinda weird, or we lost you at b-tree, don't worry--lots more details in the episode itself.