> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://til.notdu.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://til.notdu.com/database/intro-to-database-systems/tree-indexes-i/pointer-swizziling.md).

# Pointer swizziling

Node use page ids to reference other nodes in the index. The DBMS must get the memory location from the page table during traversal.

If a page is pinned in the buffer pool, then we can store raw pointers instead of page ids. This avoids address lookups from the page table.
