Advanced · Module 20 · Lesson 5 of 5
Choosing an ordered structure
Sorted arrays, heaps, balanced trees, skip lists and B-trees all keep data in order, with very different costs. The right choice follows from which operations you need, how often the data changes, and what your language provides.
By the end you can
- Match a workload's operations to the cheapest structure that supports them
- Use ordered sets for sliding-window queries, and know the Python, Java and C++ options
- Recognize when a heap, a sorted array or a hash map is enough instead of a tree
Builds on B-trees and pages, The heap property in an array.
01 · A question first
A trading system needs the current highest bid, a leaderboard needs a player's rank, a scheduler needs the next deadline, and a log viewer needs every event between two timestamps. Each could use a balanced tree, but for some of them a tree is the slowest reasonable choice. How do you tell which is which?
Make a guess before you read on.
02 · The idea
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What's inside
- Start from the operations
- The candidates
- Ordered sets in your language
- Sliding windows with order
- Combining structures
- Measure before you commit
- Pseudocode & Multi-Language Implementations (C++, Java, Python)
- Complexity Derivation, Edge Cases & Common Mistakes
03 · Practice
Asked in interviews
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