It was a joke because I asked a silly question.  Or was it?  (hahaha)  It
was (mostly) off topic nonetheless.  This turned into an offline discussion
with the resolution being an inverted text index (ala google) or GNU Mifluz
( http://www.gnu.org/software/mifluz/ ).   Data structure TBD.
The data structure contenders are:
Dictionary (hash)
Skip List (Probabilistic Insertion)
http://iamwww.unibe.ch/~wenger/DA/SkipList/
Ternary Trees
http://www.ddj.com/articles/1998/9804/9804a/9804a.htm
Good ol' B-tree

Credits go to Mikkel on the solution and excellent data structure
recommendations.  Your comments / suggestions are welcome as well.

-joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Ned Konz [mailto:ned / whidbey.net]
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2001 9:03 AM
To: ruby-talk ML; undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: [ruby-talk:18296] RE: Effecient indexing algorithm


Michael Davis wrote:

> I am planning to release my version of a btree written in Ruby sometime
> next week.  It will allow you to store terabytes of data across multiple
> files and should allow you to quickly retrieve that data.  I have the code
> written and tested.  I just need to revise my test scripts and complete
> the documentation.

How does this compare to libdb-ruby, which is a Ruby interface for the
BerkeleyDB?