PGM Indexes: Learned indexes that match B-tree performance with 83x less space
I don't get it. I've implemented B-trees. The majority of space the used by a B-tree is the data itself. Each N-ary leaf of the tree is a basically a vector of data with maybe some bookkeeping at the ends. The leaves are more than half of the tree.Sure, you can compress the data. But that depends on the data, completely random data can't be compress. Other data can be. But a point blank 83x space claim seems bizarre - or it's comparing to a very inefficient implementation of a B-tree.Edit: It seems the 83x claim is a product of the HN submission. I could not find it on the page. But even the page should say something like "a compressed index that allows full speed look-up" (akin to succinct data structures) and then it would make sense.