Question

What is the best data structure to store an oracle table that’s about 140 rows by 3 columns. I was thinking about a multi dimensional array.

By best I do not necessarily mean most efficient (but i’d be curious to know your opinions) since the program will run as a job with plenty of time to run but I do have some restrictions:

It is possible for multiple keys to be “null” at first. so the first column might have multiple null values. I also need to be able to access elements from the other columns. Anything better than a linear search to access the data?

So again, something like [][][] would work.. but is there something like a 3 column map where I can access by the key or the second column ? I know maps have only two values.

All data will probably be strings or cast as strings.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you need to access your data by key and by another key, then I would just use 2 maps for that and define a separate class to hold your record.

class Record {
   String field1;
   String field2;
   String field3;
}

and

   Map<String, Record> firstKeyMap = new HashMap<String, Record>();
   Map<String, Record> secondKeyMap = new HashMap<String, Record>();