Define Red-Black Tree and its applications

Red Black Trees are a type of self-balancing binary search tree. Rudolf Bayer invented it in 1972 and dubbed it “symmetric binary B-trees.”

A red-black tree is a Binary tree in which each node has a colour attribute, either red or black. By comparing the node colours on any simple path from the root to a leaf, red-black trees ensure that no path is more than twice as long as any other, ensuring that the tree is generally balanced.

Red-black trees are similar to binary trees in that they both store their data in two’s complementary binary formats. However, red-black trees have one important advantage over binary trees: they are faster to access. Because red-black trees are so fast to access, they are often used to store large amounts of data.

Red-black trees can be used to store any type of data that can be represented as a set of values.

Every Red-Black Tree Obeys the Following Rules:

Every node is either red or black.
The tree’s root is always black.
There are no two red nodes that are adjacent.
There is the same number of black nodes on every path from a node to any of its descendant’s NULL nodes.
All of the leaf nodes are black.

Following are some real-time applications for the Red-Black Tree data structure:

The majority of self-balancing BST library functions in C++ or Java use Red-Black Trees.
It is used to implement Linux CPU Scheduling.
It is also used to reduce time complexity in the K-mean clustering algorithm in machine learning.
MySQL also employs the Red-Black tree for table indexes in order to reduce searching and insertion time.