Introduction

  The CIFTable package contains several files that converge together in the SSTable class, a s earchable s tring table . The SSTable class has a number of characteristics that make it useful for a wide variety of applications:

• SSTable objects are general to the datatypes supported. Other types can be stored as strings and converted at a higher level.
• SSTable objects are extremely flexible. Data can be inserted and removed easily, by row, by column, or by individual cell.
• SSTable objects provide persistent storage management of themselves.
• SSTable objects have an efficient searching mechanism built internally. This mechanism allows for multiple column searching with logical conjunction and intersection.

This document describes the public and static interface to the SSTable class.