Witten et al. (1999, Chapter 5) present an extensive treatment of the subject of
index construction and additional indexing algorithms with different tradeoffs
ofmemory, disk space, and time. In general, blocked sort-based indexing
does well on all three counts. However, if conserving memory or disk space
is the main criterion, then other algorithms may be a better choice. See Witten
et al. (1999), Tables 5.4 and 5.5; BSBI is closest to “sort-based multiway
merge,” but the two algorithms differ in dictionary structure and use of compression.