Conclusion
Hashing is an effective method to quickly access data using a key value. Fortunately, Visual Basic includes collections; an effective solution that is easy to code. In this article, we compared collections with hand-coded solutions. Along the way we discovered that storing data in objects for large datasets can incur substantial penalties in both execution time and storage requirements. In this case, you can make significant gains by coding your own algorithm, utilizing arrays for node storage. For smaller datasets, however, collections remain a good choice.