US Patent 9747164 Guide word paged hash table

A set of pages including a set of entries are stored on disk. A set of page headers are stored in memory. Each page header corresponds to a page on disk. A page header includes a page number identifying a corresponding page on disk, a first guide word, and a second guide word. The first and second guide words define minimum and maximum name values, respectively, of entries on the page. Upon a request to determine if an entry associated with a name value exists, the page headers are scanned to identify a page number in a header where the name value is between the guide words. The page, if not resident in memory, is located on disk, loaded into memory, and examined to determine whether the entry exists on the page.