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Why German Strings Are Everywhere?

cedardb.com

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Re: Why German Strings Are Everywhere?

#5

In case anyone wonders why they are called German strings: the article mentions the "research predecessor" of Cedar, Umbra. Umbra is a project of TU (technical university) Munich, Germany.

I knew the C++ strings were optimized so. I do not like calling them "German". First time I see them called so (I know it, you can search yourself, as SSO -short string opt.), and looks as some kind of nationalist pride thing to me. Is certainly not a unique or new idea, many scheme/lisps implementations do that for strings AND numbers.

Downvotes coming from other connationals :) love you! I know… never say anything bad about Vaterland

Re: Why German Strings Are Everywhere?

#7
I really enjoyed this article. The storing in-place of a prefix is a neat idea for faster matching/sorting.

I wonder if they also have the concept of a reverse string which stores the (reversed) suffix instead and stores the short strings backward.

Niche, but would be fast for heavy ends-with filters.

Re: Why German Strings Are Everywhere?

#10
> To solve these problems, Umbra, the research predecessor of CedarDB, invented what Andy Pavlo now affectionately (we assume ;)) calls “German-style strings”.

This is how Borland Turbo Pascal stored strings as far back as the first version in mid-80s.

Length followed by the string.

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