Shorter checksum than MD5

[Brian Gough]

Mercuro <this at is.invalid> writes:

> I'm looking for something that is 5 bytes long, for the moment i'm
> just taking a part of the hex md5 sum (like this: checksum =
> md5sum[3:8]).  I don't have any duplicates, and I have over 100000
> records, but i'm not sure for the future...  Can anybody give me
> something better?  Or point me to some website?

For making a smaller hash, I think your approach is a good one since
you can easily increase the length if you need to.

For comparing two databases, maybe there are other options not using a
hash though (e.g.  keeping a log of which records have changed since
the last comparison).

-- 
Brian Gough

Network Theory Ltd, 
Publishing the Python Manuals --- http://www.network-theory.co.uk/python/