this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
94 points (96.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43803 readers
753 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In small datasets, the speed difference is minimal; but, once you get to large datasets with hundreds of thousands to millions of entries they do make quite a difference. For example, you're a large bank with millions of clients, and you want to get a list of the people with the most money in an account. Depending on the sorting algorithm used, the processing time could range from seconds to days. That's also only one operation, there's so much other useful information that could be derived from a database like that using sorting.