Hashtables vs. balanced search trees, cont’d

• A search tree can easily be used to return keys close in value to a given key, or to return the smallest key in the tree, or to output the keys in sorted order
• A hashtable does not normally deal with ordering information efficiently
  
  
• In a balanced search tree, delete is as efficient as insert
• In a hashtable that uses open addressing, delete can be inefficient, and somewhat tricky to implement (easy with separate chaining though)
  
  
• Overall, balanced search trees are rather difficult to implement correctly
• Hash tables are relatively easy to implement, though they depend on a good hash function for good performance