How does Virtual Machinerys Btree implementation deal with fragmentation?
Fragmentation is where the size of the file remains the same but the amount of data in it is reducing – this in effect ,means that you are wasting space. One of the compromises that we made on performance was to deal with this issue as it is particularly important for applications running on small capacity devices e.g. mobile phones, embedded devices. Virtual Machinery’s BTree constantly seeks to merge the pages in the dataset and free unused space for reuse rather than taking more disk space. We also provide tools in the toolkit that will allow you to compress data sets to their optimum size – particularly useful if you are releasing prebuilt read only datasets with your application. If you purchase a toolkit source code license you can include these utilities in your application.
