Interesting but lesser known data structures

I feel like there isn't a good excuse for programmers to not know about a lot of these structures. Yes, some of the examples are somewhat unknown (I didn't know about the 2008 paper on "Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees" for example), but many of these are something that would be at least mentioned in basic college algorithms or data-structures courses. (I have a feeling the voting is skewing my perception, and people are voting up what they've heard of and <i>think</i> are lesser known, and ignoring what they don't recognize at all).<p>I don't have a CS degree, nor am I solely a programmer, but I make sure I'm aware of the underlying fundamentals of my profession. Even without taking courses, one could easily take some time to read through the related wikipedia articles - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_structures" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_structures</a><p>P.S. I was trying to think up a good analogy to another technical trade, but I can't think of one where you can be completely unqualified, and work without licensing or certification.

Previously on HN: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370847" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370847</a><p>Certainly worth re-thinking nonetheless.

Also: binary decision diagrams (BDDs), Prolog's difference lists, and the persistent variants of common data structures. I like skip lists, too, though they seem to be fairly well-known among programmers who don't just naively use linked lists and generic hash tables for everything.

Noob question: I hacked together my little mobile website and am looking to cut down on search time for a "similar search" I built.<p>Short Description: Each "unit" has x attributes in the form of strings (tags). Searching queries a database using a standard mysql regexp search for each tag across all "units" and sorts responses by # of tags matching Desc.<p>I know this isn't StackOverflow so this isn't really a tech question. What I want to know is if the problem is just that I'm a noob (just learned to code/do web development in the past few months) and need to learn more about data structures or if that's just the nature of php/mysql regexp queries (if its a database structure issue, let's not even get into it lol)

Not sure one could call it a data structure but who remembers the so-called Sneaker Network or Tackie Network, which consisted of someone copying information onto a disk and physically walking to the other machine to copy the information. Networks were so slow/buggy that it was often quicker to transmit information using this "data structure"