Forward Looking Statements: String Theory

I wish I could post about string theory :)

We are scoping the suggestions received on allyoucanupload.com. I'll post the results soon. But I just learned something about integers and strings. As someone on the business side of tech I have to say that it's awe-inspiring to see the technical complexity that is required to build simple and scalable things for users. This is a neat example, because it's not even that complicated.

As I took the snip url idea back to James Park - who runs the product development team, he told me that the way to create unique but short URLs is to use numbers *and* letters. That way you get lots of permutations within a small url.

Makes sense I said - that's what tinyurl and snipurl do. How hard is it to do letters and numbers?

Easy said James.

"Perfect", I said...but James was looking up at the ceiling then he turned to me and said, "but a letter is a string. And a string is a lot slower than an integer at scale - and we need things that work very fast at scale."

Not so easy. not so perfect. nothing ever is. and that's what's so damn fun about this business.

we're looking further into it. If anyone knows anything relevant - let me know and that might help us get to the answer faster. cheers.

Comments

I presume James was talking about the overhead of using strings as keys in the database. However, you could simply Base64-encode/decode the integer identifier in the URLs only, and still store it as an integer in the database.
The overhead for that is not huge (and given that it seems you're using JSP on your backend I'd doubt you'd notice it at all), and given that it is only incurred on your front-end servers it scales.

Posted by: Janek Mann | June 02, 2006 at 08:26 AM