suppose that you have a large data set that contains numeric lab results that correspond to a unique patient number and weight and a small data set that contains patient numbers (a subset of those in the large data set). You can load the large data set into a hash object using the unique patient number as the key and the weight values as the data. You can then iterate over the small data set using the patient number to look up the current patient in the hash object whose weight is over a certain value and output that data to a different data set.