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