Programming

I have heard about on-disk data structures, but I am trying to understand how to implement it.

I want to write a program which is going to make use of a B-Tree which is so huge that whole of it cannot sit in memory.

Lets take a simple case of a linked list. Suppose I want to have a linked list which is going to be very big ! How do I implement that.

In normal cases, to insert a new node to the list I will use malloc() to dynamically allocate memory for the node. Now how do I write this node to the disk ? Does this mean I create a file and write the node to it or something ? hmm I dont think so...

My program is in C.

btw, Is there an on-disk implementation of b-tree available ? (on unix in C)

Thanks !!

You might be thinking of 'mmap', but you are still limited by the addressing range of the CPU.