Damian Widera-396333 (10/9/2009)
Last TechEd Europe (Barcelona, November 2008) I was talking with Kim Tripp - and she is a guru in indexing, and she told about B-trees as BALANCED TREES.Also Kalen Delaney in her books also uses the term "BALANCED TREES" and explains this as the tree is symetrical and must be like this after any modification, for example DML operation on the index.
I doubt anyone is disputing that B-Trees are balanced but we have disagreement that the "B" in the word "B-Tree" means Balanced.
The creator of that term worked for Boeing when it was created so it could stand for Boeing.
The creator's last name is Bayer so it could stand for Bayer.
The B-tree is a generalization of a binary search tree in that more than two paths diverge from a single node so the "B" could stand for binary.
The fact is, nobody really knows what the "B" stands for. Microsoft says it's Balanced but they are not the creator of the term so Microsoft is not the authority on what it means. They can only speculate like the rest of us.