All, Now that Lei is working on creating a replacement for the red-black string dictionaries, it is a good time to discuss whether we should continue to sort the dictionaries as they are written.
Reason to stay sorted: 1. Searching for values in the dictionaries can use binary search. 2. Ranges in the column can be translated into ranges in the indexes. (eg. if you want myString >= "bar" and myString < "foo" that will translate into a range of indexes. Reasons to stop sorting: 1. Sorting the dictionary means that we need to hold all of the values in uncompressed memory until the stripe is flushed. (The values are translated to the sorted order.) 2. As far as I know, there isn't any code that takes advantage of the sorted dictionaries. 3. It makes the writing code much simpler. Thoughts? .. Owen
