Bucket Hashing¶
1. Bucket Hashing¶
Closed hashing stores all records directly in the hash table. Each record \(R\) with key value \(k_R\) has a home position that is \(\textbf{h}(k_R)\), the slot computed by the hash function. If \(R\) is to be inserted and another record already occupies \(R\)'s home position, then \(R\) will be stored at some other slot in the table. It is the business of the collision resolution policy to determine which slot that will be. Naturally, the same policy must be followed during search as during insertion, so that any record not found in its home position can be recovered by repeating the collision resolution process.
One implementation for closed hashing groups hash table slots into buckets. The \(M\) slots of the hash table are divided into \(B\) buckets, with each bucket consisting of \(M/B\) slots. The hash function assigns each record to the first slot within one of the buckets. If this slot is already occupied, then the bucket slots are searched sequentially until an open slot is found. If a bucket is entirely full, then the record is stored in an overflow bucket of infinite capacity at the end of the table. All buckets share the same overflow bucket. A good implementation will use a hash function that distributes the records evenly among the buckets so that as few records as possible go into the overflow bucket.
When searching for a record, the first step is to hash the key to determine which bucket should contain the record. The records in this bucket are then searched. If the desired key value is not found and the bucket still has free slots, then the search is complete. If the bucket is full, then it is possible that the desired record is stored in the overflow bucket. In this case, the overflow bucket must be searched until the record is found or all records in the overflow bucket have been checked. If many records are in the overflow bucket, this will be an expensive process.
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2. An Alternate Approach¶
A simple variation on bucket hashing is to hash a key value to some slot in the hash table as though bucketing were not being used. If the home position is full, then we search through the rest of the bucket to find an empty slot. If all slots in this bucket are full, then the record is assigned to the overflow bucket. The advantage of this approach is that initial collisions are reduced, because any slot can be a home position rather than just the first slot in the bucket.
Bucket methods are good for implementing hash tables stored on disk, because the bucket size can be set to the size of a disk block. Whenever search or insertion occurs, the entire bucket is read into memory. Because the entire bucket is then in memory, processing an insert or search operation requires only one disk access, unless the bucket is full. If the bucket is full, then the overflow bucket must be retrieved from disk as well. Naturally, overflow should be kept small to minimize unnecessary disk accesses.
