in reply to index for large text file

Would this data be better stored in a database? To answer that you need to think about how the files are generated and used. If you look them up much more often than they are generated a database may be very worth while. If relatively small numbers of records change from time to time that may be another good reason to use a database. If you have control over generation of the current file that will make using a database easier.

True laziness is hard work

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Re^2: index for large text file
by Anonymous Monk on May 16, 2013 at 23:08 UTC
    I do not think a database would be appropriate considering this file type (FASTQ) can easily have 200,000,000 records (200,000,000 X 4 lines). We (biologists) can often have 100's if not 1,000s of these files.
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