- Berkeley DB Reference Guide:
- Environment
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Introduction
A Berkeley DB environment is an encapsulation of one or more databases, log
files, and shared information about the database environment such as
shared memory buffer cache pages.
The simplest way to administer a Berkeley DB application environment is to
create a single home directory that stores the files for the
applications that will share the environment. The environment home
directory must be created before any Berkeley DB applications are run. Berkeley DB
itself never creates the environment home directory. The environment can
then be identified by the name of that directory.
An environment may be shared by any number of processes, as well as by
any number of threads within those processes. It is possible for an
environment to include resources from other directories on the system,
and applications often choose to distribute resources to other
directories or disks for performance or other reasons. However, by
default, the databases, shared regions (the locking, logging, memory
pool, and transaction shared memory areas) and log files will be stored
in a single directory hierarchy.
It is important to realize that all applications sharing a database
environment implicitly trust each other. They have access to each
other's data as it resides in the shared regions, and they will share
resources such as buffer space and locks. At the same time, any
applications using the same databases must share an environment
if consistency is to be maintained between them.
Copyright Sleepycat Software
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