Working in Java with multidimensional arrays which have 3 columns of two data types - Column1 can be of any primitive data type, Column2 and Column3 are integers of the same size. We have thousands of these arrays with many lookup and comparison operations so we would like to see if there are faster/smaller alteatives to arrays of type object. We need to maintain the sort order and want to avoid hashing. All operations use all 3 columns.
Summarizing the requirements:
1. Maximize speed of iterating through the data structure
2. Minimize the size of the data structure
3. Maintain the sort order of the array contents
4. Avoid hashing (no LinkedHashMap)
Structures we have considered thus far:
1. Object array (current implementation)
2. Make 2 arrays (one for each data type) and during operations join them by array index lookup
Does anyone have any other (better) recommendation for data structure? Thanks :)