man XBase::SDBM () - SDBM index support for dbf
NAME
XBase::SDBM - SDBM index support for dbf
DESCRIPTION
When developing the XBase.pm/DBD::XBase module, I was trying to support as many existing variants of file formats as possible. The module thus accepts wide range of dbf files and their versions from various producers. But with index files, the task is much, much harder. First, there is little or no documentation of index files formats, so the development is based on reverse engineering.
None if the index formats support is finalized. That made it hard to integrate them into one consistent API. That is why I decided to write my own index support, and as I wanted to avoid inventing yet another way of storing records in pages and similar things, I used SDBM. It comes with Perl, so you already have it, and it's proven and it works.
Now, SDBM is a module that aims at other task than to do supporting indexes for a dbf. But equality tests are fast with it and I have creted a structure in each index file to enable walk though the index file.
VERSION
0.200
AUTHOR
(c) 2001 Jan Pazdziora, adelton@fi.muni.cz, http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/ at Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic
All rights reserved. This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.