About: HAT-trie

The HAT-trie is a type of radix trie that uses array nodes to collect individual key–value pairs under radix nodes and hash buckets into an associative array. Unlike a simple hash table, HAT-tries store key–value in an ordered collection. The original inventors are Nikolas Askitis and Ranjan Sinha. Askitis & Zobel showed that building and accessing the HAT-trie key/value collection is considerably faster than other sorted access methods and is comparable to the array hash which is an unsorted collection. This is due to the cache-friendly nature of the data structure which attempts to group access to data in time and space into the 64 byte cache line size of the modern CPU.