Method of compacting and searching a data index

摘要

An improved method for indexing and accessing data stored in a computer storage system, comprising a multi-way tree structure having interconnected branch nodes and leaf nodes. The leaf nodes contain a large number of distinction bits, rather than a smaller number of search keys as known in the prior art. A distinction bit is determined by comparing two selected search keys and determining the ordinal number of the first bit that is different between the two keys. The density of distinction bit entries in the leaf nodes permits shorter access times to obtain data records in a computer storage system.