AVL -> T-trees

Taking a cue from our MySQL friends - MySQL uses T-trees for their in-memory structures. These are balanced trees, like AVL trees. But instead of just one data item per tree node, they have N items per node. (Presumably N is a compile-time constant.) The advantage to using T-trees is that inserts and deletes have less impact on the overall tree, thus minimizing the need for rebalancing.

I would expect that they perform about as well as AVL trees for lookups. Anyone interested in experimenting here and reporting on the relative performance?