NAME
hash
—
hash database access method
SYNOPSIS
#include
<sys/types.h>
#include <db.h>
DESCRIPTION
The
dbopen
()
routine is the library interface to database files. One of the supported
file formats is hash files. The general description of the database access
methods is in dbopen(3). This manual page describes only the hash specific
information.
The hash data structure is an extensible, dynamic hashing scheme.
The access method specific data structure provided
to
dbopen
()
is defined in the <db.h>
include file as follows:
typedef struct { unsigned int bsize; unsigned int ffactor; unsigned int nelem; unsigned int cachesize; u_int32_t (*hash)(const void *, size_t); int lorder; } HASHINFO;
The elements of this structure are as follows:
- bsize
- bsize defines the hash table bucket size, and is, by default, the block size of the underlying filesystem. It may be preferable to increase the page size for disk-resident tables and tables with large data items.
- ffactor
- ffactor indicates a desired density within the hash table. It is an approximation of the number of keys allowed to accumulate in any one bucket, determining when the hash table grows or shrinks. The default value is the same as bsize.
- nelem
- nelem is an estimate of the final size of the hash table. If not set or set too low, hash tables will expand gracefully as keys are entered, although a slight performance degradation may be noticed. The default value is 1.
- cachesize
- A suggested maximum size, in bytes, of the memory cache. This value is only advisory, and the access method will allocate more memory rather than fail.
- hash
- hash is a user defined hash function. Since no hash function performs equally well on all possible data, the user may find that the built-in hash function does poorly on a particular data set. User specified hash functions must take two arguments (a pointer to a byte string and a length) and return a 32-bit quantity to be used as the hash value.
- lorder
- The byte order for integers in the stored database metadata. The number should represent the order as an integer; for example, big endian order would be the number 4,321. If lorder is 0 (no order is specified) the current host order is used. If the file already exists, the specified value is ignored and the value specified when the tree was created is used.
If the file already exists (and the
O_TRUNC
flag is not specified), the values specified
for the parameters bsize,
ffactor, lorder and
nelem are ignored and the values specified when the
tree was created are used.
If a hash function is specified,
hash_open
()
will attempt to determine if the hash function specified is the same as the
one with which the database was created, and will fail if it is not.
Backward compatible interfaces to the routines described in dbm(3) and ndbm(3) are provided, although these interfaces are not compatible with previous file formats.
ERRORS
The hash
access method routines may fail
and set errno for any of the errors specified for the
library routine
dbopen(3).
SEE ALSO
btree(3), dbopen(3), mpool(3), recno(3)
Per-Ake Larson, Dynamic Hash Tables, Communications of the ACM, April 1988.
Margo Seltzer, A New Hash Package for UNIX, USENIX Proceedings, Winter 1991.
BUGS
Only big and little endian byte order is supported.