README for the Perl module SimpleCDB
Copyright (c) 2000 Benjamin Low <
[email protected]>.
All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
Artistic License for more details.
DESCRIPTION
-----------
SimpleCDB - Perl-only Constant Database
This is a simple perl-only DB intended for constant DB applications. A
constant DB is one which, once created, is only ever read from (though
this implementation allows appending of new data). That is, this is an
"append-only DB" - records may only be added and/or extracted.
Why, oh why?
Unfortunately, all of the standard "system" DBMs (NBDM, SDBM, ODBM) are
broken when it comes to "large" data sets (though I don't generally call
20,000 records "large"). Try it, you'll see (examples/testbdm.pl program
provided). On Solaris 2.5.1 + 2.6 boxes, testdbm showed the [NSO]DBM's
failing after about 13k records. On a HPUX 10.20 machine, it took about
75,000 records to fail.
Of course, there are other fine DBMs: GDBM, DB_File (BerkeleyDB v1), and
Dan Bernstein's CDB (constant DB). All of which require a C compiler,
whereas SimpleCDB is a perl-only implementation. If you have a C compiler
handy, I recommend one of GDBM or CDB over SimpleCDB - they're (much?)
faster...
See perldoc SimpleCDB for full documentation.
INSTALLATION
------------
To install, unpack the archive and in the newly created directory type:
perl Makefile.PL
make
[make test]
make install
Use
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=<location>
to install somewhere other than the system default.
