Betty Salzberg

Biography

Betty Salzberg was elected as an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to the database field, including access methods, online reorganization methods, and robust application techniques in computing. Much of this work was in collaboration with David Lomet of the Microsoft Corporation and with Khoury graduate students.

Salzberg’s spatial indexing (called the hB-tree or Holey Brick tree) clusters data in several dimensions so that nearby data is stored on the same disk page even when there are insertions and deletions made in the collection. Her temporal indexing method (the Time-split B-tree) is an index that is optimized to answer the query: “show me the state of the data collection at a given past time.” This work was also in collaboration with Lomet.

Salzberg’s work on online reorganization concerns merging B-trees and consolidation of B-trees while work is ongoing. B-trees are the ubiquitous index in all major DBMS products.

Most recently, Salzberg has worked with Lomet and Rui Wang to make an important part of database applications recoverable.