Question

I have a “colors” table in my database.

The user enters a color trough the user interface, and the backend searches for the most similar looking color existing in the colors table, calculating the distance of the colors in the HCL space.

I will implement a caching algorithm, which should store the distance between previously calculated color distances, to avoid repeated math operations.

What is the best table layout for such purpose ?

Answer 1

As Osama said, this looks like premature optimization. Based on your description of the algorithm, I would:

• Pre-calculate the HCL vectors for all of the colors in the database, and store a table which maps a color id to its HCL vector.
• The table should be stored using the MySQL Spatial Extensions, which allow you to query for neighbors of a point.
• When a new color is chosen, transform it to HCL, and query for neighbors of its point in HCL space.
• If caching is needed at all, I would cache coarse-grained colors, so there is some chance that users revisit a previously selected color.