to the youngest (or eldestoffspring assigned to the parent possible type definition for this case is the followingand possible data structure is shown in fig type person =pointer to record namealfasiblingoffspringperson end john albert peter mary paul robert carol chris george pamela tina fig multiway tree represented as binary tree we now realize that by tilting this picture by degrees it will look like perfect binary tree but this view is misleading because functionally the two references have entirely different meanings one usually dosen' treat sibling as an offspring and get away unpunishedand hence one should not do so even in constructing data definitions this example could also be easily extended into an even more complicated data structure by introducing more components in each person' recordthus being able to represent further family relationships likely candidate that cannot generally be derived from the sibling and offspring references is that of husband and wifeor even the inverse relationship of father and mother such structure quickly grows into complex relational data bankand it may be possible to map serveral trees into it the algorithms operating on such structures are intimately tied to their data definitionsand it does not make sense to specify any general rules or widely applicable techniques howeverthere is very practical area of application of multiway trees which is of general interest this is the construction and maintenance of large-scale search trees in which insertions and deletions are necessarybut in which the primary store of computer is not large enough or is too costly to be used for long-time storage assumethenthat the nodes of tree are to be stored on secondary storage medium such as disk store dynamic data structures introduced in this are particularly suitable for incorporation of secondary storage media the principal innovation is merely that pointers are represented by disk store addresses instead of main store addresses using binary tree for data set ofsaya million itemsrequires on the average approximately log ( about search steps since each step now involves disk access (with inherent latency time) storage organization using fewer accesses will be highly desirable the multiway tree is perfect solution to this problem if an item located on secondary store is accessedan entire group of items may also be accessed without much additional cost this suggests that tree be subdivided into subtreesand that the subtrees are represented as units that are accessed all together we shall call these subtrees pages figure shows binary tree subdivided into pageseach page consisting of nodes