Uniform organization of inverted files
Dalia Motzkin, Kenneth L. Williams, Karl Chang · AFIPS conference proceedings · 1984
A range attribute is defined as an attribute that may assume a range of values. Examples might be Age = (1--10, 11--14, 15--16, ...) or Salary = (0-1000, 1001-1500, ...). This paper is concerned with the selection of ranges that will produce reasonably uniform numbers of records in each range. A set of algorithms has been developed to enable the file designer to obtain a set of ranges such that records are distributed uniformly between the ranges. Although in a given case perfect uniformity may not be achievable, the algorithms can find ranges such that for a set of X records in a range, bounds a and b may be given so that a ≤ X ≤ b for all ranges. The algorithms have been tested with a PASCAL program.