]> > I am developing an application that needs fast access to persistent > configuration data, and I thought that DBM might be a good way to > provide that functionality ... but I see that DBM isn't available on > Windows. As others mentioned, you could compile the C sources for a DBM implementation on Windows, then build the Caml/DBM binding. > Is there something similar that works on all platforms? Or an > alternative approach? > By the way, I'm at an early prototyping stage, so I can't be much more > specific about my needs. What I can say at this point is that speed is > important; I think I need a key-value data structure, and it's probably > okay for the types of both keys and values to be limited to strings, as > with DBM. I guess it all depends on the number of key-value pairs: - For a few hundred entries, just parsing a plain text file is very fast, e.g. using an ocamllex-generated lexer to do the parsing. Plain text files also make debugging easier. - Up to 10^5 entries, input_value of a hash table or a "map" is quite fast, e.g. less than 0.1 seconds. This is what I use in the SpamOracle mail filter to read the database of word frequencies. It is true that the binary format used by input_value may change in future OCaml releases, but so does the format of DBM databases, and the input_value format hasn't changed in incompatible ways since 1996 or so :-) Still, it is prudent to support conversions between input_value form and some textual, portable form. - Beyond 10^5 entries, either DBM or a real database (such as MySQL) seems best. Remember that DBM files are quite large, so an SQL approach might be more effective. Hope this helps, - Xavier Leroy ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners