cdb
overview
keywords: constant
database
key-value
public domain
tinycdb
cdb
.
cdb
, or the Constant Database, is a simple key-value
read only database format, originaly created by Dan J
Bernstein.
original cdb program
The original cdb program can be found at http://cr.yp.to/cdb.html.
tinycdb
tinycdb is another implementation of the cdb
library. This library has a pretty straightforward C API,
and has also been placed in the public domain
.
file format specification
the file format spec, adopted from the cdb website.
A structure for constant databases
19960914
Copyright 1996
D. J. Bernstein, [email protected]
A cdb is an associative array: it maps strings ("keys") to strings
("data").
A cdb contains 256 pointers to linearly probed open hash tables. The
hash tables contain pointers to (key,data) pairs. A cdb is stored in
a single file on disk.
+----------------+---------+-------+-------+-----+---------+
| p0 p1 ... p255 | records | hash0 | hash1 | ... | hash255 |
+----------------+---------+-------+-------+-----+---------+
Each of the 256 initial pointers states a position and a length. The
position is the starting byte position of the hash table. The length
is the number of slots in the hash table.
Records are stored sequentially, without special alignment. A record
states a key length, a data length, the key, and the data.
Each hash table slot states a hash value and a byte position. If the
byte position is 0, the slot is empty. Otherwise, the slot points to
a record whose key has that hash value.
Positions, lengths, and hash values are 32-bit quantities, stored in
little-endian form in 4 bytes. Thus a cdb must fit into 4 gigabytes.
A record is located as follows. Compute the hash value of the key in
the record. The hash value modulo 256 is the number of a hash table.
The hash value divided by 256, modulo the length of that table, is a
slot number. Probe that slot, the next higher slot, and so on, until
you find the record or run into an empty slot.
The cdb hash function is "h = ((h << 5) + h) ^ c", with a starting
hash of 5381.
related projects
sdb is a KV database
by radare
based on djb's cdb disk storage.
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