Direct Method

In direct hashing, the key is the address without any hashing manipulation. The structure must therefore contain an element for every possible key. The situations in which you can use direct hashing are limited, but it can be very powerful because it guarantees that there are no synonyms. Let’s look at two applications.

Now let’s take an example. Imagine that a small organization has fewer than 100 employees. Each employee is assigned an employee number between 1 and 100. In this case, if we create an array of 101 employee records, the employee number can be directly used as the address of any individual record. This concept is shown in Figure 5.

Note that not every element in the array contains an employee’s record. In fact, all hashing techniques other than direct hashing require that some of the elements be empty to reduce the number of collisions.

Although this is the ideal method, its application is very limited. For example, we cannot have the National Identity Card Number as the key using this method because National Identity Card Number is 13 digits. In other words, if we use the National Identity Card Number as the key, we need an array as large as 1,000,000,000,0000 records but we would use fewer than 100 of them. Let’s turn our attention, then to hashing techniques that map a large population of possible keys into a small address space.