HAT-Trie: A Cache-Conscious Trie-Based Data Structure For Strings

Tries are the fastest tree-based data structures for managing strings in-memory, but are space-intensive. The burst-trie is almost as fast but reduces space by collapsing trie-chains into buckets. This is not however, a cache-conscious approach and can lead to poor performance on current processors. In this paper, we introduce the HAT-trie, a cache-conscious trie-based data structure that is formed by carefully combining existing components. We evaluate performance using several real-world datasets and against other highperformance data structures. We show strong improvements in both time and space; in most cases approaching that of the cache-conscious hash table. Our HAT-trie is shown to be the most efficient trie-based data structure for managing variable-length strings in-memory while maintaining sort order.