in reply to Re: Huge data file and looping best practices
in thread Huge data file and looping best practices

thanks @przemo. I'll check out Bit::Vector. We think there are only about 400,000 unique characteristic sets among the 8 million patents, so we'll probably end up dealing with that data set instead, on account of the absurd amount of data this program would return.
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Re^3: Huge data file and looping best practices
by davido (Cardinal) on Apr 27, 2009 at 02:35 UTC

    If you have 400,000 unique characteristic sets among the 8 million patients, now you're getting somewhere. If you could find a way to consistently stringify a given set the same way each time it comes up, you could turn that into a hash key, and as its value create a datastructure of patient names. Now you have a workable structure that could be split into manageable files based on the groupings by unique characteristics.

    ...just a thought, though I'm not sure how helpful it is.


    Dave