DBOPEN - DATABASE ACCESS METHODS


Dbopen is the library interface to database files. The supported file format are btree, hashed ans UNIX file-oriented.

The btree format is a representation of a sorted, balanced tree structure.

The hashed format is an extensible, dynamic hashing scheme.

The flat-file format is a byte stream file with fixed or variable length records.

The formats and file format-specific information is described in detail in the manual pages included with the dbopen package.

Dbopen was written by Keith Bostic (bostic@cs.berkeley.edu) of the University of California at Berkeley.

Unlike most traditional Unix "db" implementations, both key and data byte strings may be of essentially unlimited length.

The Tcl interface to dbopen was written by NeoSoft, and is based on a Tcl/dbopen interface written by Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@data.fls.dk).

NeoSoft added shared and exclusive file locking, non-blocking access, "db forall" and "db searchall" access methods, code cleanup and reformatting, plus some other stuff.

A summary of the dbopen function and methods follows: