5 Data Structures That You Probably Are Unfamiliar With (But Are Extremely Useful!)

#5: Did you know that Redis & LevelDB use Skip Lists?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

1. Bloom Filter

It is a probabilistic data structure that is used to find out if an element exists in a set or not.

In other words, it can tell if an element probably (and not definitely) exists in a set or not.

It is space efficient because it does not store the actual elements in it (like a Hash Map).

Also, Bloom filters can give false positive results but they do not have false negatives.

A Bloom Filter is formed by a Bit Vector of n bits (8 in the diagram below).