Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!madd From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Problems with ndbm Message-ID: <36321@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 12 Aug 89 05:33:09 GMT References: <34200002@zaphod> <34200003@zaphod> <18933@mimsy.UUCP> Reply-To: madd@buit15.bu.edu (Jim Frost) Followup-To: comp.unix.questions Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group Lines: 17 My peeve about ndbm is that it doesn't really allow "combined key/data of up to 4096 bytes". It'll let you *try*, but with larger key/data combinations, you'll get large numbers of failures on similar keys. We found that you don't get reliable insertion unless the records are pretty short (circa 128 bytes; 1024 failed a lot and 2048+ failed much of the time; for our use anything smaller than 1k was pretty useless). The simple way to get around this is to use ndbm to maintain indeces into a file of records, which works great, but I still tore my hair out before doing this. If someone in-the-know could explain this behavior to me, I would be grateful. jim frost software tool & die madd@std.com