Hi,

From: "why the lucky stiff" <ruby-talk / whytheluckystiff.net>
>
> rubyhacker / gmail.com wrote:
> 
>>I used to store YAML inside DBM. That's kind of a clunky solution.
>>What's more:
>>  1. DBM doesn't work on Windows.
>>  2. DBM files aren't readable cross-platform.
>>  
>>
> No, MouseHole does it.

Unless something has changed recently, my experience with
SDBM under Windows on both Ruby and Perl, is that it begins
to malfunction after N keys are inserted, where N varies
depending on size of keys/values inserted. . . .

On October 17, 2004, I tried the following:

    One of my tests yesterday was to try to store
    1,000,000 key/values.  The keys were always length 8.
    The values were random, between length 1 and length
    511.  After several minutes it managed to store about
    47,000 keys before it upchucked a "sdbm_store failed".
    And the .dbm file was up to 1.7 GB.


As an aside - I *think* Zed Shaw's odeum bindings
[ http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/ruby_odeum/ ] allow access
to the lower level hash-based data storage facilities, not
just the higher level inverse index capability... FWIW


Regards,

Bill