Hash function performance on different biological databases.

Open hashing is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of several hashing functions for the uniform distribution of biological records. The three types of database tested include (1) genetic nomenclature, mutation sites and strain names, (2) surnames extracted from literature files and (3) a set of 1000 numeric ASCII strings. Several hash functions (hashpjw, hashcrc and hashquad) showed considerable versatility on all data sets examined while two hash functions, hashsum and hashsmc, performed poorly, on the same databases.