Depending on which hash you use you can get upwards of "document hask keys won't collide before the heat-death of the universe".

There is of course a lot more to it than that. Google around about hashing, cryptography, and cryptographic hash functions. There are many good websites that will go into the "lot more to it" without having to have a degree in mathematics to understand them.

  -ljr

Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
winds up having a write cache, which is mutable in practice.  The
interesting thing is that the block's location is the cryptographic
hash of its contents, which leads to all sorts of neat properties (as
well as requiring immutability).

That's interesting.  When I developed a version control system for a customer, 
I also used a cryptographic hash as the database key of file+content in 
question, but I was afraid I might have clashes (two files with different 
content generating the same hash)... My intuition told me that the odds of two 
cryptographic hashes (on meaningful content) colliding was much less than the 
earth being destroyed by an asteroid... But this is just intuition... What does 
computer science tell us about this?

Thank you,
Peter







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Lanny Ripple <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
ScmDB / Cisco Systems, Inc.
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