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Odi's astoundingly incomplete notes

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Don't use gdbm

GDBM is a tiny embedded database. Convenient as an internal data store for applications. However, as you can see from this Gentoo Bug, the database format is highly dependent on the architecture and even compiler flags. So it is far from portable. You can not necessarily exchange its files between platforms or different machines of the same platform running different OS versions. It may even break like in this case during a simple upgrade, when the configure flags change.

Having such an unstable database format is inherently bad architecture. I recommend not to use this library in any application. It will cause someone a bad day.

posted on 2010-01-05 10:58 UTC in Code | 0 comments | permalink