Depending on which hash you use you can get upwards of "document hask keys won't collide before the heat-death of the universe". There is of course a lot more to it than that. Google around about hashing, cryptography, and cryptographic hash functions. There are many good websites that will go into the "lot more to it" without having to have a degree in mathematics to understand them. -ljr Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
winds up having a write cache, which is mutable in practice. The interesting thing is that the block's location is the cryptographic hash of its contents, which leads to all sorts of neat properties (as well as requiring immutability).
That's interesting. When I developed a version control system for a customer, I also used a cryptographic hash as the database key of file+content in question, but I was afraid I might have clashes (two files with different content generating the same hash)... My intuition told me that the odds of two cryptographic hashes (on meaningful content) colliding was much less than the earth being destroyed by an asteroid... But this is just intuition... What does computer science tell us about this?
Thank you, Peter
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Lanny Ripple