Hash Table Reorganization

Abstract We consider the operation of permuting in place the records of an open address hash table in order to correspond to a different hashing function. Our emphasis is primarily on minimizing the amount of work space used. Lower and upper bounds are derived on the unrestricted problem, that is, without making any assumptions about the probing discipline used. For the special case of linear probing, we give an algorithm which, in practice, requires no work space outside the table and which runs in linear time with respect to the table size.