launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 5:22 AM, Guilherme Salgado
<guilherme.salgado@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> How do you guys feel about it?  Maybe you have other ideas about how we
> can implement this?

Do whatever is simplest. We are only dealing with short lists here so
no point worrying about the details.

With big sets, you want to use integers or bigint with large gaps and
do minimal shuffling when necessary as you suggested. Using floats
makes you think you can avoid shuffling, but that just defers the
problem until rounding errors cause a collision (and floats will
probably be slower than integers anyway). A linked lists can avoid
reshuffling but most of the time changes require just as many inserts
and updates, and query performance is terrible when you want to
retrieve the list in order since you need to do a recursive query.

-- 
Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>