My grasp of computing theory isn't terribly strong or theoretical so I hope others will correct me if anything I say here is inaccurate....
I got curious to see if I could find a good basic description of hashing online so I did a Google search on "hash index". I was surprised how many hits I had to rule out because they weren't terribly clear; most assumed too much prior knowledge to be clear to somone without the basic concepts behind them. 1. I eventually found one at http://ciips.ee.uwa.edu.au/~morris/Year2/PLDS210/hash_tables.html that may still be a bit theoretical for some tastes but it has a nifty animation that illustrates hashing functions at work which I think may clarify matters somewhat. The link for the animation is near the bottom of the page. By the way, this page does not use the term 'hash index' very much but I think it would be safe to think of a 'hash index' as just being a 'hash table' that points to a data table in a relational database. Again, I'm counting on the people with more theory background to jump in if that is not reasonable. 2. I found another explanation at http://bo.majewski.name/bluear/gnu/GLib/ch03.html which includes some C language code, which may be of interest if you program in C. If these explanations doesn't answer your questions, you could try some web searches of your own and/or consult a good computer science textbook that explains standard programming algorithms. I don't happen to have such a book so I can't recommend one in particular but others may be able to suggest a good one. Rhino ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lou Olsten" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 6:01 PM Subject: Hash Index This one is more curiosity than a problem. I have read the docs about HASH indexes and how they are used, but I'm just wholly unfamiliar with WHAT a HASH index is. I'm only familiar with the term 'hash' as it relates to encryption. What exactly IS a hash index? Just curious, Lou -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
