"Ann W. Harrison" <aharrison@...> wrote:

>
> And one other question. How do other databases handle this problem?

In Oracle, empty index blocks are marked as free but remain in the index
structure, i.e. they cannot be reused for other purposes, AFAIK. As for the
block merge/split, their algorithm is similar to ours, but I don't know how
many blocks they exclusively lock per split operation.


Dmitry