Question

If you were looking for a record in a very large database and you knew the ID number, which of the following would be the most direct way to locate the record?



sort
find
locate
filter

Answer 1

I think this would depend on which database server it is. It has been a while since I did anything with them, but let me apply a little logic.

Sort is going to do just that, go through each record and order them according to some criterion. Not exactly fast and you still need to look up the record when it is done!

find = Some type of search

locate = Some type of search

filter lets you look at groups of records, and not so much individual ones. So you could filter to see only the last week of entries or filter to get any entries with a particular zip code or so on and so forth. I doubt it would be an efficient search.

So look up the specifics of these terms, but start with find and locate with a focus on how they differ. If one is primarily an ID or full field search, that could be very fast. If one looks inside the data of each field for partial matches, that would be very slow.

Answer 2

If the ID is the primary key, it should be indexed. In which case, applying a "WHERE ID = x" filter in the SQL would be a very fast operation.

Generally, when you retrieve results from a database, you're only getting the specific subset of the data that interests you. It's generally faster to do all processing in the database (if the database supports it).


The answers they've provided don't really make it easy to understand what they mean. Surely, the most direct way to locate something is to locate it, but in this case, the thing that makes sense in a database is to filter it. Ask for clarification from the problem-setter.