Feature request: a way to know what things changed

[dead-claudia]

I'm thinking this could be as simple as the following:

• Provide a "tag" that updates when any prefix updates.
• Get a list of 5-letter prefixes that changed

From a backend perspective, you could avoid expensively iterating all 2^20 entries on every single request when the function's hot by doing something like this:

• For the "tag", return a monotonically increasing counter, incremented by at least 1 on change. The important thing is that older tags come before newer tags.
• For the data, it could just live in a prefix -> tag table, along with a record for "current tag". This current tag, along with the whole table, could be cached and stored in an array sorted by tag (and optionally then by prefix).
  • If Azure Functions only allows function instances to process one request at a time, the sorted array can be generated on ingest and just read by the querying function. (I don't know if Azure Functions works this way, but I know AWS Lambda does.)
• Results returned would just be a matter of finding the first prefix in the array with a given tag >= the one provided, and returning every prefix from that one on.

[dead-claudia]

Let me know if anything needs clarified.