Hashing

[Nedungadi Poornima]

What is hashing? & how Hashtable works in Java?

[Sunil Kumar Gupta]

Hashing is a common method of accessing data records. Consider, for example, a list of names:

John Smith
Sarah Jones
Roger Adams

To create an index, called a hash table, for these records, you would apply a formula to each name to produce a unique numeric value. So you might get something like:

1345873 John smith
3097905 Sarah Jones
4060964 Roger Adams

Then to search for the record containing <B>Sarah Jones</B>,
you just need to reapply the formula, which directly
yields the index key to the record. This is much more efficient than searching through all the records till the matching record is found.

[Nedungadi Poornima]

Thnx a lot Sunil..