What is a hash value in Oracle? What is the significance of it?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

A "hash value" is not particular to Oracle. Rather, it is a computer science concept. I will briefly explain this concept, but you can read more about hash values at Wikipedia.

Data is often stored in an array, which is a set of consecutive chunks of memory. Oracle's caches are often predefined arrays. The array is not big enough to hold everything. So Oracle takes that thing and applies some mathematical function to determine which chunk of memory, or the cell in the array, will hold the thing. This mathematical function is called a "hash function." This function returns an index to the array, which is commonly called the hash value.

This was first published in March 2007

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top