Practical Spatial Hash Map Updates
Pascal Gautron · Apress eBooks · 2021
Spatial hashing is a very efficient approach for storing sparse spatial data in a way that easily allows merging information among areas with similar properties. Though having a very simple core, this technique requires careful implementation to achieve high efficiency. In this chapter we first consider some key principles and implementation aspects. The original spatial hashing is initially limited to storing simple data types, which can be updated using atomic calls. The second part of this chapter adds support for arbitrary data storage in the hash map, while still guaranteeing the atomicity of the updates. We achieve this using on-the-fly generation of change lists for each modified hash map entry.