Data Structures

On April 7, 2005, Linus Torvalds made the first commit to a new version control system. He had started coding it just four days earlier, on April 3rd, after the proprietary tool he had been using for Linux kernel development became unavailable. The kernel community needed something fast, distributed, and capable of handling thousands of contributors. What Torvalds built in those frantic days wasn’t just another version control system—it was a content-addressable filesystem disguised as one. ...

When you create an index on a database table, have you ever wondered what data structure actually powers it? The answer is almost always a B+ tree. Not a hash table. Not a regular B-tree. Not a binary search tree. B+ trees have been the default index structure in nearly every major relational database for over five decades—MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and SQLite all use them. This isn’t coincidence or legacy inertia. It’s the result of fundamental trade-offs between disk I/O patterns, range query efficiency, and storage utilization. ...