Opportunistic Garbage Collection Obviousness

The "sequential" in indexed sequential means that the file can be accessed in record order (sequenced by key) or by direct access by key. In general, it matters that the keys are ordered. Typically, an index is used to map keys to the external storage blocks where the corresponding record is to be found. It is common for the index to be organized as some for of wide tree and how the index is cached matters.

The technique described in the patent is strictly about hashed indexing by keys and there is no information or assumption about being able to somehow navigate the hashed records in some key-based sequence nor is it presumed that such be possible.

I see that there is a variation of indexed-sequential in which the index is built using a hash technique (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_Sequential_Access_Me...). I have no idea what is hashed for that to work and how that helps with how the index itself is managed. But since you built one, perhaps you can enlighten us where hashing was done as part of working down to the location of a record have a particular exact key?

In any case, the Sequential in Indexed Sequential is not the sequential in the sense that the linked list of list items for records having the same hash code is considered sequential. Indeed, there is generally no requirement that the positions of those records in the list be sequenced in some way, although Knuth points out the advantage of doing so, since the detection that the desired record is not present can happen more efficiently.

There is also considerable importance, to ISAM, that the index for random access be loadable into memory in some manner or otherwise cached, since the records themselves were often on external storage and even insertions might be rather costly unless buckets of records retained slack for some reasonable number of insertions, with an overflow mechanism (not related to what we mean by hash overflow) for any excess.

And of course, in common usage, the only way to clean up an ISAM file was to reorganize the whole thing with some sort of utility, not unlike disk defragmenting.