ndbm

State of the art structured storage for 1986.

ndbm is a Go wrapper around the POSIX NDBM database interface. NDBM is built into Mac OS X and FreeBSD, and is available as a compatibility mode of the GDBM library on Linux.

API documentation is available on GoDoc.

Why?

I wrote the first version of this library on a Mac on a cruise ship, where I needed a persistent key-value store, but had no Internet connection, just OS X system libraries, man pages, and Go documentation.

Linux notes

Most Linux distros don't package an NDBM implementation. Debian/Ubuntu users should install libgdbm3 and libgdbm-dev before building.

To make this package go gettable, I've targeted the quirky GDBM 1.8, which is the version available on Ubuntu 12-15 and Debian 7-8, instead of attempting build-time library detection, which would allow using the current and more NDBM-compatible GDBM 1.11.

If you are using a recent GDBM that provides ndbm.h, you will probably need to delete gdbm_compat.h and gdbm_compat_linux.c and the #ifdef __linux checks.

Background

POSIX standard for NDBM:

• http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/dbm_open.html
• http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/ndbm.h.html

Mac OS X NDBM:

• https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man3/dbm_open.3.html (Note that this is a BSD man page, and the datum struct described is wrong for OS X.)
• http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-997.90.3/include/ndbm.h

FreeBSD NDBM:

• https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dbm&apropos=0&sektion=3&manpath=FreeBSD+10.0-RELEASE&format=html
• https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/lib/libc/db/hash/ndbm.c
• https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/include/ndbm.h

GDBM:

• http://www.gnu.org.ua/software/gdbm/manual/html_node/ndbm.html