A direct and unified approach is used to analyze the efficiency of batched searching of sequential and tree-structured files. The analysis is applicable to arbitrary search distributions, and closed-form expressions are obtained for the expected batched searching cost and savings. In particular, we consider a search distribution satisfying Zipf's law for sequential files and four types of uniform (random) search distribution for sequential and tree-structured files. These results unify and extend earlier research on batched searching and estimating block accesses for database systems.

This paper presents a combined algorithm to perform batch insertion, deletion, and update for tree structured files. The efficiency of the algorithm is analyzed for performing updates only and insertions only. A cost analysis example is reviewed to demonstrate that batch operations for tree structured files achieve the advantages of a differential database representation and, at the same time, avoid the drawbacks previously attributed to the use of differential files.