Given transaction details including item name, quantity, and price, how would you determine the top 50 best-selling items at the end of the day, considering both a fixed number of items and a scenario with a very large number of items? What data structures would you use?

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Accepted Answer

Choosing data structures for tracking top sold items based on transaction details.

For fixed number of items, use an array or a list to store transactions and sort them at the end.
Example: Use a simple array to hold item names and their sales count, then sort to find top 50.
For large number of items, consider using a min-heap to efficiently track the top 50 items.
Example: A min-heap allows you to maintain the top 50 items while processing each transaction in O(log k) time.

Given transaction details including item name, quantity, and price, how would you determine the top 50 best-selling items at the end of the day, considering both a fixed number of items and a scenario with a very large number of items? What data structures would you use?

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