  One of the main goals of design theory is to classify, characterize and count
various combinatorial objects with some prescribed properties. In most cases,
however, one quickly encounters a combinatorial explosion and even if the
complete enumeration of the objects is possible, there is no apparent way how
to study them in details, store them efficiently, or generate a particular one
rapidly. In this paper we propose a novel method to deal with these
difficulties, and illustrate it by presenting the classification of quaternary
complex Hadamard matrices up to order 8. The obtained matrices are members of
only a handful of parametric families, and each inequivalent matrix, up to
transposition, can be identified through its fingerprint.
