concept hash tree in category nosql

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Making Sense of NoSQL. Login to get full access to this book.

The data structure used to detect if two trees are the same is called a hash tree or Merkle tree. Hash trees work by calculating the hash values of each leaf of a tree, and then using these hash values to create a node object. Node objects can then be hashed and result in a new hash value for the entire directory. An example of this is shown in figure 3.13.