HashMap initialization

[Tom Panahil]

Here's my situation -
I am loading data from a RDBMS and putting it into a hashmap for quick access in later processing. I get a ResultSet, iterate through, and populate my hash.

I want to init my HashMap so it is efficient... about the right size to avoid rehashing, but not bigger than I need. But, until I get through the ResultSet, I don't know how much stuff I am dealing with... 50 records, 100, 1000...

Any thoughts?

[Ramasubbhu Allur Kuppusamy]

When you are iterating through the ResultSet and populating the HashMap as and when you encounter a new row, you should have no problems with the efficiency of HashMap.
As far as my lnowledge goes, HashMap's size is decided dynamically.

[vidya sagar]

once you Execute the ResultSet, you can check the size of records.Right!

Then construct the Hashmap with a capacity

HashMap objHM = new HashMap(<size of records> ;

[Jeff Albertson]

Originally posted by vidya sagar:
once you Execute the ResultSet, you can check the size of records.Right!

Then construct the Hashmap with a capacity

HashMap objHM = new HashMap(<size of records> ;

That doesn't sound right. If the poster is thinking of moving to the bottom on the ResultSet and back to the top, that will probably take more time than using a forward-only record set and populating the Map in the simplest possible way.

To the original poster: don't sweat the efficiency until you discover it's a problem. How many rows are we talking about anyway? If this really is a concern (which I doubt), I would execute an efficient query written to *estimate* the size of your proper query. Then use that size to intial the capacity of the Map.

[Ramasubbhu Allur Kuppusamy]

Tom,
What was the solution, finally?

[Peter Chase]

Originally posted by vidya sagar:
once you Execute the ResultSet, you can check the size of records.Right!

Then construct the Hashmap with a capacity

HashMap objHM = new HashMap(<size of records> ) ;

This isn't right, because the value taken by HashMap constructor is the size of its internal arrays, not the number of entries it can store. You need to supply a larger number. Read the API.

... or don't bother. In the vast majority of cases, just initialising the HashMap with the default constructor will perform fine.