Theory - Best way to store this type of data for retrieval?

Question

Hi everyone,
So I'm pretty new to databases and I'm trying to figure out an efficient way to retrieve this kind of data:
an ID that is 36 digits long
col1 = {option1, option2, option3...}
col2 = {option1, option2, option3...}
coln = {option1, option2, option3...}
I need to be able to perform queries on the data based on some concatenation of 3 digit sequences for the ID
for example, I may want to retrieve all the records where the ID begins with '123' or where the ID begins with '123123', or '123123200', etc,
There are going to be close to a billion if not more of these records
the 3 digit sequences will always be a number between 000-255
It is not necessary for me to have a 36 digit long ID, I simply chose that because it seemed like the simplest way to associate a record with its combination of 3 digit sequences.
Like I said, I'm very new to databases. I've been doing a lot of reading on indexing and clustering and nested tables and partitions, but I'm not quite sure which of these I should pursue with this kind of data. Most of the examples that I've read about don't really deal about querying with variable precision.
Would the best way to get this data simply be to use an 'is like' statement on the ID? If so, are there any kinds of indexing I should take a look at that would benefit from knowing that the is like statements would follow the format of <3 digits,3 digits,3 digits>? Also, at the data level, would it be more efficient to use hexadecimal to store the sequences of 3 digits since they conviently fall in the range of 00-FF? I'm just throwing ideas out there, I haven't found much help browsing the web, but maybe I haven't looked in the right place. If anyone has any ideas or places to redirect me, it would be great!
Also, I know sometimes it helps to know the main kind of queries on the data that someone is primarily concerned about. In this case, most queries will be selective counts, for example finding the number of records whose ID's begin with '123006011' and col1='option1'.
Thanks,
Alex
Edited by: user9022475 on Jun 23, 2010 9:37 AM

Answer 1

So I'm starting to rewrite my code. I was shocked at how easy it was to implement the SAX parser, but it works great. Now I'm on to doing away with my nasty string arrays.
Of course, the basic layout of the XML is like this:
<result1>
<element1>value</element1>
<element2>value</element2>
</result1>
<result2>
I thought about storing each element/value in a HashMap for each result. This works great for a single result. But what if I have 1000 results? Do I store 1000 HashMaps in an ArrayList (if that's even possible)? Is there a way to define an array of HashMaps?