2020/03/13 by Thomas Mueller Graf, Daniel Lemire · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #Network Packet Processing and Optimization #Advanced Database Systems and Queries #Bloom filter #Filter (signal processing) #Cuckoo #Generalization #Set (abstract data type) #Bitwise operation #Filter design
paper · doi:10.1145/3376122
openalex created_date 2019/12/26 · openalex publication_date 2020/03/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The Bloom filter provides fast approximate set membership while using little memory. Engineers often use these filters to avoid slow operations such as disk or network accesses. As an alternative, a cuckoo filter may need less space than a Bloom filter and it is faster. Chazelle et al. proposed a generalization of the Bloom filter called the Bloomier filter. Dietzfelbinger and Pagh described a variation on the Bloomier filter that can answer approximate membership queries over immutable sets. It has never been tested empirically, to our knowledge. We review an efficient implementation of their approach, which we call the xor filter. We find that xor filters can be faster than Bloom and cuckoo filters while using less memory. We further show that a more compact version of xor filters (xor+) can use even less space than highly compact alternatives (e.g., Golomb-compressed sequences) while providing speeds competitive with Bloom filters.