README for the Perl module SimpleCDB Copyright (c) 2000 Benjamin Low . 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= to install somewhere other than the system default.