From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-10-06T17:50:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Large disc-based "hash"?

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 11:19:49AM +0900, rcoder@gmail.com wrote:
> DBM, GDBM, and SDBM are all database formats (and libraries to access
> them) which, like Berkeley DB, allow simple key/value mappings to be
> saved to disk, and updated incrementally. However, each has various
> limitations as to data size per key, total database size, or
> performance on large datasets which Berkeley DB does not. None of them

dbm, sdbm and ndbm have rather low limits for the data size IIRC.
gdbm had no such restrictions.

> natively offer transaction support, or handle concurrent access to the
> same database gracefully.

gdbm (at least) allows concurrent reader access to the db; however
when you have a writer process no other simultaneous access is possible.
In practice, gdbm is often adequate if you don't need transactions and
your db is not too large. I've heard it is often faster than bdb due to
the lack of transactions.

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