1XBase::SDBM(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation XBase::SDBM(3)
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6 XBase::SDBM - SDBM index support for dbf
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9 When developing the XBase.pm/DBD::XBase module, I was trying to support
10 as many existing variants of file formats as possible. The module thus
11 accepts wide range of dbf files and their versions from various produc‐
12 ers. But with index files, the task is much, much harder. First, there
13 is little or no documentation of index files formats, so the develop‐
14 ment is based on reverse engineering.
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16 None if the index formats support is finalized. That made it hard to
17 integrate them into one consistent API. That is why I decided to write
18 my own index support, and as I wanted to avoid inventing yet another
19 way of storing records in pages and similar things, I used SDBM. It
20 comes with Perl, so you already have it, and it's proven and it works.
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22 Now, SDBM is a module that aims at other task than to do supporting
23 indexes for a dbf. But equality tests are fast with it and I have
24 creted a structure in each index file to enable "walk" though the index
25 file.
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31 (c) 2001 Jan Pazdziora, adelton@fi.muni.cz,
32 http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/ at Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk Uni‐
33 versity in Brno, Czech Republic
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35 All rights reserved. This package is free software; you can redis‐
36 tribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
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40perl v5.8.8 2003-11-21 XBase::SDBM(3)