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An interesting idea would be to imitate filesystems and provide an actual "current working node" concept to the application. The current working node is a hint which contains a pointer to a BTree node. This could be the leaf node where some item was previously found, or one node higher above the leaf level.

When the search for an item fails from the current working node, it falls back on earnestly searching from the root.

If a node is split or merged by insertions or deletions, then if any current working node pointers to it exist, they get invalidated or updated somehow. (The B-Tree object could carry a small dynamic set of current working node items which it can update when the tree mutates.)



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