(temorary) solution for the database index problems ?!?!

Hi Marten,

 Marten Terpstra <marten at BayNetworks.com> writes:
 * 
 * Why didn't anyone ask me? It is definately an DBM bug, or rather the

The first report came from Tony Bates (You probably still remember him
;-)) and most of the discussion was done on the 'db-wg' mailing list
(true this subject belongs more on rr-impl). We more or less (wrongly?)
assumed that you were on that mailing list and that if Tony had this
problem it was something new ...

 * way DBM grows its datafiles. It basically is rather stupid when it needs
 * more space and will take an increasing chunk of disk space for the
 * index. Not using the -p option will only be a temporary measure, only
 * because you make the database smaller (no prime entries) but you do
 * make it flatter. Try and make or run a perl with sdbm or gdbm. These
 * two have better size control than the standard dbm (esp gdbm) but are
 * slower when indexing.

This was also my conclusion, but we would like to know for sure that it
is the dbm package since this problem appeared within *one* week with
several people using completely different sizes of filesystems... I don't
like to maintain a timebomb that will go off some other day ... I better
be sure about this.

I hear that most people recommend the Berkeley db package so I am
experimenting with that one ... (Check the perl5 man pages 'man
AnyDBM_File' and you know why ;-)).

Kind regards,

David Kessens
RIPE NCC Database software maintainer
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