[pylucene-dev] OT: what's wrong with bsddb?

[Peter Fein]

On Friday 05 January 2007 12:31, Andi Vajda wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Peter Fein wrote:
> > [0] Has anyone else had difficulties w/ bsddb (outside PyLucene)? 
> > Despite it's excellent reputation, it's given us lots of trouble.  We've
> > been using gdbm instead.
>
> What kind of troubles ?

Hmm, let's see:

 * len(db) doesn't work reliably - sometimes gives wrong/negative answers
 * keys sometimes get 'lost' when iterating over largish (~200K) db's - the 
data's not corrupted, the library just confuses itself.  There's a python bug 
for this, I can't find it ATM.
 * DBNoMemoryError: (12, 'Cannot allocate memory -- Lock table is out of 
available locker entries') - this was the last straw, never found out what 
the problem was.  Some sort of create-time config option, IIRC.

Basically, we found it just required too much hand-holding / broke far too 
easily to make it worthwhile.  And no, we weren't doing anything outlandish 
(hi-to-my-friends-at-collabnet).  The only advantages relative to gdbm we 
found were not needing to run optimize() periodically and cross platform 
support.

--Pete

-- 
Peter Fein                                                     pfein at pobox.com
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