What is the best data structure for storing a set of four (or more) values?

Question

Say I have the following variables and its corresponding values which represents a record.

name = 'abc'
age = 23
weight = 60
height = 174

Please note that the value could be of different types (string, integer, float, reference-to-any-other-object, etc).

There will be many records (at least >100,000). Each and every record will be unique when all these four variables (actually its values) are put together. In other words, there exists no record with all 4 values are the same.

I am trying to find an efficient data structure in Python which will allow me to (store and) retrieve records based on any one of these variables in log(n) time complexity.

For example:

def retrieve(name=None,age=None,weight=None,height=None) 
    if name is not None and age is None and weight is None and height is None:
        /* get all records with the given name */
    if name is None and age is not None and weight is None and height is None:
        /* get all records with the given age */
    ....
    return records

The way the retrieve should be called is as follows:

retrieve(name='abc') 

The above should return [{name:'abc', age:23, wight:50, height=175}, {name:'abc', age:28, wight:55, height=170}, etc]

retrieve(age=23) 

The above should return [{name:'abc', age:23, wight:50, height=175}, {name:'def', age:23, wight:65, height=180}, etc]

And, I may need to add one or two more variables to this record in future. For example, say, sex = 'm'. So, the retrieve function must be scalable.

So in short: Is there a data structure in Python which will allow storing a record with n number of columns (name, age, sex, weigh, height, etc) and retrieving records based on any (one) of the column in logarithmic (or ideally constant - O(1) look-up time) complexity?

Answer 1

There isn't a single data structure built into Python that does everything you want, but it's fairly easy to use a combination of the ones it does have to achieve your goals and do so fairly efficiently.

For example, say your input was the following data in a comma-separated-value file called employees.csv with field names defined as shown by the first line:

name,age,weight,height
Bob Barker,25,175,6ft 2in
Ted Kingston,28,163,5ft 10in
Mary Manson,27,140,5ft 6in
Sue Sommers,27,132,5ft 8in
Alice Toklas,24,124,5ft 6in

The following is working code which illustrates how to read and store this data into a list of records, and automatically create separate look-up tables for finding records associated with the values of contained in the fields each of these record.

The records are instances of a class created by namedtuple which is a very memory efficient because each one lacks a __dict__ attribute that class instances normally contain. Using them will make it possible to access the fields of each by name using dot syntax, like record.fieldname.

The look-up tables are defaultdict(list) instances, which provide dictionary-like O(1) look-up times on average, and also allow multiple values to be associated with each one. So the look-up key is the value of the field value being sought, and the data associated with it will be a list of the integer indices of the Person records stored in the employees list with that value — so they'll all be relatively small.

Note that the code for the class is completely data-driven in that it doesn't contain any hardcoded field names which instead are all taken from the first row of csv data input file when it's read in. Of course when using an instance, all retrieve() method calls must provide valid field names.

Update

Modified to not create a lookup table for every unique value of every field when the data file is first read. Now the retrieve() method "lazily" creates them only when one is needed (and saves/caches the result for future use). Also modified to work in Python 2.7+ including 3.x.

from collections import defaultdict, namedtuple
import csv

class DataBase(object):
    def __init__(self, csv_filename, recordname):
        # Read data from csv format file into a list of namedtuples.
        with open(csv_filename, 'r') as inputfile:
            csv_reader = csv.reader(inputfile, delimiter=',')
            self.fields = next(csv_reader)  # Read header row.
            self.Record = namedtuple(recordname, self.fields)
            self.records = [self.Record(*row) for row in csv_reader]
            self.valid_fieldnames = set(self.fields)

        # Create an empty table of lookup tables for each field name that maps
        # each unique field value to a list of record-list indices of the ones
        # that contain it.
        self.lookup_tables = {}

    def retrieve(self, **kwargs):
        """ Fetch a list of records with a field name with the value supplied
            as a keyword arg (or return None if there aren't any).
        """
        if len(kwargs) != 1: raise ValueError(
            'Exactly one fieldname keyword argument required for retrieve function '
            '(%s specified)' % ', '.join([repr(k) for k in kwargs.keys()]))
        field, value = kwargs.popitem()  # Keyword arg's name and value.
        if field not in self.valid_fieldnames:
            raise ValueError('keyword arg "%s" isn\'t a valid field name' % field)
        if field not in self.lookup_tables:  # Need to create a lookup table?
            lookup_table = self.lookup_tables[field] = defaultdict(list)
            for index, record in enumerate(self.records):
                field_value = getattr(record, field)
                lookup_table[field_value].append(index)
        # Return (possibly empty) sequence of matching records.
        return tuple(self.records[index]
                        for index in self.lookup_tables[field].get(value, []))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    empdb = DataBase('employees.csv', 'Person')

    print("retrieve(name='Ted Kingston'): {}".format(empdb.retrieve(name='Ted Kingston')))
    print("retrieve(age='27'): {}".format(empdb.retrieve(age='27')))
    print("retrieve(weight='150'): {}".format(empdb.retrieve(weight='150')))
    try:
        print("retrieve(hight='5ft 6in'):".format(empdb.retrieve(hight='5ft 6in')))
    except ValueError as e:
        print("ValueError('{}') raised as expected".format(e))
    else:
        raise type('NoExceptionError', (Exception,), {})(
            'No exception raised from "retrieve(hight=\'5ft\')" call.')

Output:

retrieve(name='Ted Kingston'): [Person(name='Ted Kingston', age='28', weight='163', height='5ft 10in')]
retrieve(age='27'): [Person(name='Mary Manson', age='27', weight='140', height='5ft 6in'),
                     Person(name='Sue Sommers', age='27', weight='132', height='5ft 8in')]
retrieve(weight='150'): None
retrieve(hight='5ft 6in'): ValueError('keyword arg "hight" is an invalid fieldname')
                           raised as expected