Mergeable Dictionaries

A data structure is presented for the Mergeable Dictionary abstract data type, which supports the following operations on a collection of disjoint sets of totally ordered data: Predecessor-Search, Split and Merge. While Predecessor-Search and Split work in the normal way, the novel operation is Merge. While in a typical mergeable dictionary (e.g. 2-4 Trees), the Merge operation can only be performed on sets that span disjoint intervals in keyspace, the structure here has no such limitation, and permits the merging of arbitrarily interleaved sets. Tarjan and Brown present a data structure which can handle arbitrary Merge operations in O(log n) amortized time per operation if the set of operations is restricted to exclude the Split operation. In the presence of Split operations, the amortized time complexity of their structure becomes Ω(n). A data structure which supports both Split and Merge operations in O(log^2 n) amortized time per operation was given by Farach and Thorup. In contrast, our data structure supports all operations, including Split and Merge, in O(log n) amortized time, thus showing that interleaved Merge operations can be supported at no additional cost vis-a-vis disjoint Merge operations.