Re: Primary Key Hash help

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 12:37:51AM +0900, Chris Morris wrote:
> > As it's a hash, of course, it is not guaranteed to generate unique
> > values for unique rows. In practice I'd be very(!) surprised if you
> > got a clash, but it it was crucially important that keys were
> > one-to-one with records you might want to find an alternative.
> 
> Yeah, I did a little reading between there and here -- it does seem quite
> unlikely, but possible. Is there an alternative that's in the same ballpark,
> but not what angus suggested? I'm guessing not -- unless there was something
> inherent in my dataset that I could take advantage of.
> 
> I'll probably go with MD5 -- for my needs I'd be able to detect a duplicate
> hash should it ever occur and deal with it then.
> 

If you find a duplicate in your small dataspace, you will be famous
overnight, not to mention the gigantic ripple that you will cause
in computer security. In fact, if you do discover a collision, I know some
people from the NSA that would pay you well to tell them first.
:)



-- 
Jim Freeze
If only I had something clever to say for my comment...
~