  This paper presents a general technique for optimally transforming any
dynamic data structure that operates on atomic and indivisible keys by
constant-time comparisons, into a data structure that handles unbounded-length
keys whose comparison cost is not a constant. Examples of these keys are
strings, multi-dimensional points, multiple-precision numbers, multi-key data
(e.g.~records), XML paths, URL addresses, etc. The technique is more general
than what has been done in previous work as no particular exploitation of the
underlying structure of is required. The only requirement is that the insertion
of a key must identify its predecessor or its successor.
  Using the proposed technique, online suffix tree can be constructed in worst
case time $O(\log n)$ per input symbol (as opposed to amortized $O(\log n)$
time per symbol, achieved by previously known algorithms). To our knowledge,
our algorithm is the first that achieves $O(\log n)$ worst case time per input
symbol. Searching for a pattern of length $m$ in the resulting suffix tree
takes $O(\min(m\log |\Sigma|, m + \log n) + tocc)$ time, where $tocc$ is the
number of occurrences of the pattern. The paper also describes more
applications and show how to obtain alternative methods for dealing with suffix
sorting, dynamic lowest common ancestors and order maintenance.
