On Feb 20, 2013 at 3:54 pm, Tim Starling wrote:
The idea of storing a database in a large string literal could be made to be fairly efficient and user-friendly if a helper module was written to do parsing and a binary search.
I have implemented the above suggestion with some promising results. Packing a large table in a string and unpacking it on demand appears to work well, and the data is accessed as if it were stored in a standard table. Using the table from Wiktionary Module:Languages mentioned earlier in this thread, testing shows that accessing the packed data is 20 times faster. Info is at
http://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Johnuniq#Big_tables
Johnuniq