
README for the Perl module SimpleCDB

	Copyright (c) 2000 Benjamin Low <b.d.low@ieee.org>. 
	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=<location>

to install somewhere other than the system default.
