Brandon Invergo

Release of zeptodb 2.0

I’m happy to announce the release of zeptodb 2.0.

zeptodb is a small collection of relatively tiny tools for interacting with flat (non-relational) databases. In fact, they are merely minimal command-line tools implementing the functionality of a DBM library. Thus, the databases they manipulate are simple, key-value hash tables.

These tools may be helpful in scripts, for example, when persistant data storage is needed but when a full database would be overkill. They may also be useful if, for whatever reason, one would like to manipulate, via the command-line or scripts, DBM databases created by other programs.

New in this release:

  • Kyoto Cabinet back-end is now available.
    • At compile time, you can now opt to use the Kyoto Cabinet DBM library instead of the GDBM library. Note that any databases created with the GDBM library will not be accessible with the Kyoto Cabinet library.
  • Database creation now has a dedicated program
    • Previously, zeptodb databases were created automatically upon storing the first value in them. Now, there is the zdbc tool dedicated to creating new databases. This tool allows you to control some parameters of the database, namely the number of hash buckets and the size of the memory-mapped region that it uses. As a result, zdbs will no longer automatically create new databases.
  • New --verbose mode
    • All tools now have a --verbose option, which causes them to display more information while they work. This is particularly handy when you are working with thousands of entries.
  • General code refactoring
    • To cleanly handle the two DBM back-ends, the code was significantly refactored, making it easier to read and edit.

You can download the release from the zeptodb website. If you use Arch Linux or one of its derivatives, you’ll find zeptodb in the AUR.