This is more of less how a page is represented in memory.

There are a few things to note. The entries immediately following the page header points to the actual data at the end of the page. Why is that? Well, remember that we are working with a fixed size page. And we need to add data to the page in a sorted fashion, and do this cheaply. In order to do that, we always add the actual data at the end of the file, before any other data. When the page is empty, we add the value in the end. And the next value is immediately before the previous value, etc.

However, as you can see in the image, the fact that we add values in a particular order doesn’t mean that they are sorted in that order. In order to get good sorting, we keep a list of the entries offsets in the beginning of the page, just after the header. This is a sorted list, which gives us the ability to easy add / move an item in the page without actually moving the page, just by changing the offset position it is located on. If we would add another entry to this page, with the key C, the actual data would go on top of entry# 3. But the offset recording this entry would go between B & A at the head of the page.

In other words, the actual data of the page grows upward, and the offsets pointing to the locations of entries in the page grows downward. A page is full when you can’t fit the next data item and its offset in the space between the data & the offsets.

So that is addition. How about deletion. When we delete, we need to recover the space, but that is actually very easy to handle. Let us say that we want to delete the A entry. That means that we need to do the following. Move all the higher entries data downward to cover the space taken by the entry, and then update the offsets to reflect that. In the end, we are left with:

Updates work as a pair of delete/add operations, with some important edge cases. What happen if we have a page that is nearly full, and we want to update an entry that is bigger than it can currently hold? We have to check if the value is also too big if the previous value is removed. If not, we can fit it into the currently page. Otherwise, we would have to do a page split to accommodate it.

Surprisingly enough, the code that is required to handle that is quite pretty, although the actual mechanism probably require a whiteboard to explain. And a lot of hand waving.