哈希表与AVL树链接

Question

i am hashing strings.. and then i have to sort second strings alphabetically. I have to be able to delete,insert or get number of position in my sorted tree of second strings. So, for example i have hash table based on type of animals (cat,dog..) and each bucket has AVL tree with names sorted aplhabetically.

insert("cat","Garfield"); insert("cat","Zoro");

garfield and zoro would have same hash key because they are both cats but garfield would be root and zoro right child.. so when i would want to delete garfield i have to sort the tree again..

My question is, if hash table + avl tree is the fastest option? also like i said i need to be able to get name of animal base on type(hash key) plus index.

edit:This is just an example everything is variable and inserted through function so number of spieces can be 1million and names too

Answer 1

In general, if your requirement has lot of traversals that covers the entire table and also if there are lot of deletions or insertions than seach operations, then AVL trees are preferred. However, if your requirement needs lot of search operations relatively (relative to insertion or deletion), then Hash table is a very good option..

In case if you are going in for hashing in which collision resolution is by chaining then the array is used to hold the key and a pointer to a tree / linked list ( Here its a tree). In that case, the disadvantage is that the memory overhead will be high and less locality of reference.