Hi Henrik,
On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 08:29:07PM +0700, Henrik Sarvell wrote:
> Given a very large amount of external objects, representing for instance
> transactions, what would be the quickest way of handling the creation stamp
> be with regards to future lookups by way of start stamp and end stamp?
>
> It seems to me that using two relations might be optimal, one +Ref +Date
> and an extra +Ref +Time. Then a lookup could first use the +Date relation
> to filter out all transactions that weren't created during the specified
> days followed by (optionally) a filter by +Time.
You could use two separate relations, but then I would definitely
combine them with '+Aux'
(rel d (+Aux +Ref +Date) (t)) # Date
(rel t (+Time)) # Time
In this way a single B-Tree access is sufficient to find any time range.
For example, to find all entities between today noon and tomorrow noon:
(collect 'd '+Mup
(list (date) (time 12 0 0))
(list (inc (date)) (time 11 59 59)) )
Another possibility is using not two separate relations, but a single
bag relation
(rel ts (+Ref +Bag) ((+Date)) ((+Time))) # Timestamp
This saves a little space in the objects, but results in the same index
entry format.
But anyway, in both cases a single index tree is used. In the first case
you also have the option to define the time as
(rel t (+Ref +Time)) # Time
with an additional separate index, so that you can search also for
certain time ranges only (no matter what the date is).
> Or am I over-thinking it, is a simple +Ref +Number with a UNIX timestamp an
> easier approach that is just as fast?
I think this would not make any difference in speed (regarding index
access), but would have some disadvantages, like having to convert this
format to/from PicoLisp date and time values, and being limited in range
(the Unix timestamp cannot represent dates before 1970).
> A +Ref +String storing the result of a call to stamp would be ideal as the
> information is human readable without conversions. However, I suspect that
> a start-end lookup on it would be much slower than the above, or?
Yes, a bit perhaps. Parsing and printing human readable date and time
values is simple in PicoLisp (e.g. with 'date', 'stamp', 'datStr' and
related functions, see http://software-lab.de/doc/refD.html#date).
♪♫ Alex
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