GDBM

GNU dbm binding for Raku

Synopsis

use GDBM;

my $data = GDBM.new('somefile.db');

$data<foo> = 'bar';

say $data<foo>:exists;

$data.close;

# Then in some time later, possibly in another program

$data = GDBM.new('somefile.db');

say $data<foo>;

$data.close;

Description

The GNU DBM stores key/value pairs in a hashed database file. Its implementation allows for keys and values of arbitrary length (compared to fairly frugal limits on some earlier implementations.)

This module allows for the data to be transparently managed as if it were in an normal Associative container such as a Hash. The only limitation currently is that both key and value must be strings (or can be meaningfully stringified,) so e.g. structured data will need to be serialised to some format that can be represented as a string. However it can be used for persistence or caching if this doesn't need to be shared by processes on different machines.

Installation

In order to install this you will need to have the GDBM development packages installed in order to build the wrapper this library requires on Linux this may be either libgdbm-dev or libgdbm-devel depending on the distribution. For FreeBSD the database/gdbm port will install everything that is required.

Assuming that you have a working installation of Rakudo you should be able to install this with zef :

 zef install GDBM

 # Or if you have a local checkout of the code

 zef install .

Support

The gdbm library itself is mature and well tested so it's likely that any bugs you find are ones I have introduced into the wrapper. I'd rather do without the C wrapper but the gdbm api is rather awkward for Rakudo NativeCall to deal with otherwise.

If you have any suggestions/fixes or actual bugs please report them to https://github.com/jonathanstowe/Raku-GDBM/issues

Licence & Copyright

This is free software, please see the LICENCE file for details.

© Jonathan Stowe 2017 - 2021