I talked a bit about some of the advantages in this pretty old blog post: https://www.singlestore.com/blog/what-is-skiplist-why-skiplist-index-for-memsql/ https

I talked a bit about some of the advantages in this pretty old blog post: https://www.singlestore.com/blog/what-is-skiplist-why-skiplist-index-for-memsql/ https://www.singlestore.com/blog/what-is-skiplist-why-skipli... Simplicity is really the biggest advantage. Being simple, its much easier to implement a skiplist lock free vs other data structures. This helps it perform really well under highly concurrent point read and write workloads. Its not as good at scans, but if you really care about scan performance you should be using a columnstore layout (and not a tree).