I'd look at using a B-tree for this type of problem, lookups are efficient once the tree is created. Balancing the tree when adding or removing elements can be somewhat expensive, but b-trees don't need to be balancing as frequently as binary trees so it's not too bad. Many databases use b-trees -- but you seem to be ruling those out for some reason ;)

In reply to Re: Heap structure for lookup? by RichardK
in thread Heap structure for lookup? by BrowserUk

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