What Cannot be Skipped About the Skiplist: A Survey of Skiplists and Their Applications in Big Data Systems

Skiplists have become prevalent in systems. The main advantages of skiplists are their simplicity and ease of implementation, and the ability to support operations in the same asymptotic complexities as their tree-based counterparts. In this survey, we explore skiplists and their many variants. We highlight many scenarios of how skiplists are useful and fit well in these usage scenarios. We study several extensions to skiplists to make them fit for more applications, e.g., their use in the multi-dimensional space, network overlaying algorithms, as well as serving as indexes in database systems. Besides, we also discuss systems that adopt the idea of skiplists and apply the probabilistic skip pattern into their designs.