Package elki.database.ids

Database object identification and ID group handling API.

Database IDs (short: DBID) in ELKI are based on the factory pattern, to allow replacing the simple Integer-based DBIDs with more complex implementations, e.g., for use with external databases or to add tracking for debugging purposes. This also allows adding of more efficient implementations later on in a single place.

DBID interface:

The DBID object identifies a single object.

The DBIDs hierarchy contains classes for handling groups (sets, arrays) of IDs, that can be seen as a two-dimensional matrix consisting

ArrayDBIDs HashSetDBIDs
ModifiableDBIDs ArrayModifiableDBIDs HashSetModifiableDBIDs
StaticDBIDs ArrayStaticDBIDs n/a

StaticDBIDs are structures that cannot support modifications, but thus can be implemented more efficiently, for example as Interval. They are mostly used by the data sources.

These interfaces cannot be instantiated, obviously. Instead, use the static DBIDFactory.FACTORY, which is also wrapped in the DBIDUtil class.

Examples:


 DBIDs allids = database.getIDs();
 // preallocate an array of initial capacity 123 
 ArrayModifiableDBIDs array = DBIDUtil.newArraySet(123);
 // new DBID hash set with minimum initial capacity
 ModifiableDBIDs hash = DBIDUtil.newHashSet();
 
 // add all DBIDs from the hash
 tree.addDBIDs(hash)

Utility functions: