Modern Minimal Perfect Hashing: A Survey

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Lehmann, Hans-Peter, Mueller, Thomas, Pagh, Rasmus, Pibiri, Giulio Ermanno, Sanders, Peter, Vigna, Sebastiano, Walzer, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Lehmann, Hans-Peter
Mueller, Thomas
Pagh, Rasmus
Pibiri, Giulio Ermanno
Sanders, Peter
Vigna, Sebastiano
Walzer, Stefan
author_facet Lehmann, Hans-Peter
Mueller, Thomas
Pagh, Rasmus
Pibiri, Giulio Ermanno
Sanders, Peter
Vigna, Sebastiano
Walzer, Stefan
contents Given a set $S$ of $n$ keys, a perfect hash function for $S$ maps the keys in $S$ to the first $m \geq n$ integers without collisions. It may return an arbitrary result for any key not in $S$ and is called minimal if $m = n$. The most important parameters are its space consumption, construction time, and query time. Years of research now enable modern perfect hash functions to be extremely fast to query, very space-efficient, and scale to billions of keys. Different approaches give different trade-offs between these aspects. For example, the smallest constructions get within 0.1% of the space lower bound of $\log_2(e)$ bits per key. Others are particularly fast to query, requiring only one memory access. Perfect hashing has many applications, for example to avoid collision resolution in static hash tables, and is used in databases, bioinformatics, and stringology. Since the last comprehensive survey in 1997, significant progress has been made. This survey covers the latest developments and provides a starting point for getting familiar with the topic. Additionally, our extensive experimental evaluation can serve as a guide to select a perfect hash function for use in applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modern Minimal Perfect Hashing: A Survey
Lehmann, Hans-Peter
Mueller, Thomas
Pagh, Rasmus
Pibiri, Giulio Ermanno
Sanders, Peter
Vigna, Sebastiano
Walzer, Stefan
Data Structures and Algorithms
Given a set $S$ of $n$ keys, a perfect hash function for $S$ maps the keys in $S$ to the first $m \geq n$ integers without collisions. It may return an arbitrary result for any key not in $S$ and is called minimal if $m = n$. The most important parameters are its space consumption, construction time, and query time. Years of research now enable modern perfect hash functions to be extremely fast to query, very space-efficient, and scale to billions of keys. Different approaches give different trade-offs between these aspects. For example, the smallest constructions get within 0.1% of the space lower bound of $\log_2(e)$ bits per key. Others are particularly fast to query, requiring only one memory access. Perfect hashing has many applications, for example to avoid collision resolution in static hash tables, and is used in databases, bioinformatics, and stringology. Since the last comprehensive survey in 1997, significant progress has been made. This survey covers the latest developments and provides a starting point for getting familiar with the topic. Additionally, our extensive experimental evaluation can serve as a guide to select a perfect hash function for use in applications.
title Modern Minimal Perfect Hashing: A Survey
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06536