Updating record when referenced by multiple data structures

Question

Suppose I have a record, e.g. Person, and I want to be able to look this person up through multiple data structures. Maybe there\'s an index by name, another in

Answer 1

I would probably just update every lookup structure with the new value. Perhaps grouping the structures in a record and providing a global update function.

Or perhaps you could designate one of the search criteria as "primary", and have the values in the other lookup maps point to the "primary key" of the object, instead of to the object value itself. That would cause one additional lookup for each access by non-primary key, though.