3 ms·
That sounds like an interesting technique - but it unfortunately does not apply on a majority of real-world data. In particular I mean sorting non-English text
by hendzen 10y ago
That sounds like an interesting technique - but it unfortunately does not apply on a majority of real-world data.
In particular I mean sorting non-English text which any serious database needs to be able to do. Subtracting characters doesn't work when you're dealing language specific Unicode collation [0].
[0] - http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/
- zlynx 10y agoYeah, well, you just can't do it that way and be fast at the same time. I mean seriously fast. What you can do is decide how your comparison should be collated and preprocess your strings into a sort key form that is strictly big-endian binary (first byte has highest weight). Or little-endian I suppose, whichever works best for your hardware. Your sort key doesn't have to be the actual string.