Re: [ROOT] Comparison of speed of accessing data

From: Guillermo Moloche (gmoloche@mit.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 19:12:41 MET


> I am doing a comparison of speed of accessing data
> in a root file and in a custom database file in our company.

I had exactly the same problem.

Trees save themselves using ZIP compression to save disk space. Maybe you 
could try turning ZIP compression off, this will cut uncompressing time 
significantly BUT... disk space and disk access time might be a problem since 
ROOT's tree format is not designed to save memory but to handle complex 
objects, ALSO check file sizes, the ROOT file might be significantly larger.

My solution was NOT to use trees to save the data, instead, I designed a 
tick-data format which is very efficient and uses on-the-fly uncompressing so 
disk access takes very little time. The trick is to play around with the 
algorithm so un-compressing time is shorter than disk access time. There is no 
need to worry about compression time since tick files are mostly read-only.

In my experience this has turned out to be quite faster than a SQL database.



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