Shorter checksum than MD5

[Mercuro]

Brian Gough wrote:

> Mercuro <this at is.invalid> writes:
> 
> 
>>I'm looking for something that is 5 bytes long, for the moment i'm
>>just taking a part of the hex md5 sum (like this: checksum =
>>md5sum[3:8]).  I don't have any duplicates, and I have over 100000
>>records, but i'm not sure for the future...  Can anybody give me
>>something better?  Or point me to some website?
> 
> 
> For making a smaller hash, I think your approach is a good one since
> you can easily increase the length if you need to.
> 
> For comparing two databases, maybe there are other options not using a
> hash though (e.g.  keeping a log of which records have changed since
> the last comparison).
> 

thx

please read the reply under Paul Rubin for more 
information about the compare thingy. It's a bit 
to long to post twice.