Editing Delta encoding (section)

==Implementation issues==
The nature of the data to be encoded influences the effectiveness of a particular compression algorithm.

Delta encoding performs best when data has small or constant variation; for an unsorted data set, there may be little to no compression possible with this method.

In delta encoded transmission over a network where only a single copy of the file is available at each end of the communication channel, special [[error-correction|error control codes]] are used to detect which parts of the file have changed since its previous version.
For example, [[rsync]] uses a rolling [[checksum]] algorithm based on Mark Adler's [[adler-32]] checksum.