***Bitmapped Indexing API Beta - Now Available***

***Bitmapped Indexing API Beta - Now Available*** -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bit-mapped indexing is still a relatively un-explored in the DB field. It is with this in mind that I set out to produce a library of routines for creating, managing and manipulating bit-maps. Although the Bitmap API could be used for manipulating any form of bitmap, they were specifically designed for bit-mapped indexing. There are a number of factors that make these routines superior to those currently used by Sysbase, Oracle, Redbrick and the other DB vendors that have implemented this BM (bitmap) technology: 1) The ability store 100,000 bits in 14K. This is WORST case senario. At best, 100,000 bits can be stored in 34 bytes. 2) ALL THE ROUTINES ACT UPON THE COMPRESSED DATA, therefore: i) No de-compression time. ii) Extremely fast data manipulation because of the size of the data set being manipulated. 3) THE ROUTINES OVERCOME THE PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH HIGH CARDINALITY DATA. This is basically acheived by breaking the data into sections. If there is no data in a particular section, a BM for that section is not stored. E.g. A bit-map is divided into 10 sections, each representing 10,000 bit positions, i.e. a 100,000 bit BM. If position 1, 10,000, and 100,000 is set, only 3 - 6 bytes at most would be required to store the BM positions. (This excludes section header information, which is about 8 bytes for every section, i.e. 24 bytes in the example above) The BM functions include functions for: 1) ANDing 2) ORing 3) XORing 4) NOTing 5) ORXing (deleting) 6) XNORing 7) NANDing 8) NORIng 9) Finding 10) Search Next 11) Search Previous 12) Trimming 13) Counting 14) Adding 15) Deleting 16) Appending..... and more. I am able to perform various logical operations (1 - 8), on 2 source data sets of 10,000,000 bits each, and produce a result data set in 0.9 seconds for any single operation. Once again this is WORST case senario. Best case... I am unable to time them, as the timing function returns 0.0000. My test have been conducted on a Acer 90MHz Pentium with 24MB memory. A beta version of the Bitmap API is now available. The API comprises of a 16-bit Windows DLL, a 32-bit Windows DLL, a complete function reference for the over 250 functions, and a user's guide. The release version of the bitmap API will also include the 16 and 32-bit static link libraries and on-line documentation. If anybody is interested in testing the routines, please send me an e-mail at one of the following addresses: bitmapindx@aol.com bitmapindx@intellistar.net