If you know what you are doing, you may well realize a performance advantage. For example LevelDB (which is conceptually based on Google BigTable's design) loo

If you know what you are doing, you may well realize a performance advantage. For example LevelDB (which is conceptually based on Google BigTable's design) looks a lot like a balancing tree in its access patterns, but is a lot faster than a variety of alternatives. And it is faster in part because sequential data is stored sequentially in order instead of using a data structure that results in random access patterns. And no. It doesn't use linked lists.