Hello,
>Do you know what you are asking?
Thanks, of course not! (hahaha)  This is about as open ended as you can get.
But basically here are my constraints.  I want to store and retrieve large
volumes of information.  I want to access this information via an index that
is not (necessarily) constrained by hard and fast limitations such as a 32
bit integer.  So would this exclude hashing?  Assume for the sake of
argument it is every genomic combination in existence for humans including
proteins and a few random peptic combinations.  We are talking possibly
trillions of combinations here and each combination would be programatically
represented as an object.  So we are not talking terabytes in this case but
a whole lot of data nonetheless.  I would like to know that i can put as
many files as I want wherever I want without my index crushing itself under
the weight of its own bloat.  Obviously a post not specifically geared
towards ruby but more of an N-Complete question.  Since there are so many
smart comp-sci types out there in ruby-land maybe someone has a tasty piece
of code I could grok for my indexing pleasure. ;-)

Thanks
-joe

PS: i don't have access to those newsgroups with my ISP, i'll try
deja-google.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kero van Gelder [mailto:kero / d4050.upc-d.chello.nl]
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2001 4:38 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: [ruby-talk:18273] Re: Effecient indexing algorithm


> Does anyone have an efficient indexing algorithm or care to point me in
the
> right direction.  I am looking to index several terabytes of data across
> mutiple files.  The file format does not matter so much as the ability to
> keep a low memory footprint based on the size of the index and for any
given
> query the index must be efficiently sorted.

Tried Rubies hashtable?
Would a B/B+/B* tree do?
Your best/fastest bet is probably a professional database.

TERAbytes?
Do you know what you are asking?
Try comp.sci.datastructures or comp.sci.algorithms (if they exist) or
something.

Bye,
Kero.

+--- Kero ------------------------------ kero / chello.nl ---+
|  Don't split your mentality without thinking twice       |
|                          Proud like a God -- Guano Apes  |
+--- M38c ------- http://members.chello.nl/~k.vangelder ---+