Is there any library for indexing binary data?

[Irmen de Jong]

On 25-3-2010 10:55, 甜瓜 wrote:
> Thank you irmen. I will take a look at pytable.
> FYI, let me explain the case clearly.
> 
> Originally, my big data table is simply array of Item:
> struct Item
> {
>      long id;    // used as key
>      BYTE payload[LEN];   // corresponding value with fixed length
> };
> 
> All items are stored in one file by using "stdio.h" function:
>      fwrite(itemarray, sizeof(Item), num_of_items, fp);
> 
> Note that "id" is randomly unique without any order. To speed up
> searching  I regrouped / sorted them into two-level hash tables (in
> the form of files).  I want to employ certain library to help me index
> this table.
> 
> Since the table contains about 10^9 items and LEN is about 2KB, it is
> impossible to hold all data in memory. Furthermore, some new item may
> be inserted into the array. Therefore incremental indexing feature is
> needed.

I see, I thought the payload data was small as well. What about this idea:
Build a hash table where the keys are the id from your Item structs and
the value is the file seek offset of the Item 'record' in your original
datafile. (although that might generate values of type long, which take
more memory than int, so maybe we should use file_offset/sizeof(Item).
This way you can just keep your original data file (you only have to
scan it to build the hash table) and you will avoid a lengthy conversion
process.

If this hashtable still doesn't fit in memory use a sparse array
implementation of some sort that is more efficient at storing simple
integers, or just put it into a database solution mentioned in earlier
responses.

Another thing: I think that your requirement of 1e7 lookups per second
is a bit steep for any solution where the dataset is not in core memory
at once though.

Irmen.