Re: Flat Query

oh yes, part of the transition to explicit dbms index structures ... basically was when updates & rebuild of a complete sorted flat file became more expensive than the disk space overhead (and associated processing) for explicit indexes that allowed doing incremental updates on the fly (w/o having to rebuild the complete sorted file after each batch of updates).

... oh, and the phone book letter frequency radix search was actually better than the 16-to-5 probe comparison. the phone book was organized using physical 4k records with an avg. of approx. 50 phone records per physical record. the letter frequency radix search could frequently pick the related physical record on the first probe.

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Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/