3.1 Sample Node Database (NDB)
The following is a sample illustration of how various pages and blocks are used to represent various entities of the NDB Layer.
Figure 20: Application of pages and blocks
The first and second columns of the diagram represent the NBT, which is accessed through the BREFNBT structure in the ROOT structure. In this example, the NBT consists of a 2-level BTree that contains a number of top-level nodes. In the second column, the node on the top contains both a data BID (bidData) and a subnode BID (bidSub), whereas the node on the bottom only contains a data BID but no subnode.
In the Legend, that there are two types of arrow notations. The single arrowhead indicates data that can be directly accessed by means of a BREF structure (which contains the absolute file offset of the target); and the double-arrowhead with "BBT" indicates data that needs to be accessed indirectly using a BBT search to lookup the data block that is associated with the BID.
The top node's bidData points directly to a data block, which contains the external, end-user data associated with this node.
In addition, the top node also contains a subnode, which points to a 2-level subnode BTree. The Level 1 SIBLOCK fans out to a number of different Level 0 SLBLOCKs (only one is shown in the diagram for simplicity). Each SLBLOCK further contains a number of internal subnodes (4th column). In this example, the internal subnode points to a single data block (5th column). The subnode can recursively contain any number of levels of subnodes to create a hierarchical tree of subnodes.
The second top-level node (bottom node in 2nd column) is an example of a data tree with one XBLOCK, which contains an array of BIDs that point to several data blocks that contains the end-user data.