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Re: dropping back-ldbm



Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:

The fact that you've had issues getting BDB to work in your
environment is unfortunate, but it is well documented at this point as
to both how to build the BDB libraries, and how to configure the BDB
environment.



Yet how to configure BDB remains a FAQ.


The fact that people routinely ignore documentation doesn't seem pertinent to this discussion.

And our "issues" were not related to that, but to BDB bugs or
limitations.


BDB or back-bdb? Please be more precise in your comments.

(...)


Maybe we've just have had bad timing, but so far BDB has had issues
every time we have had time to look at switching to BDB at our site.
E.g. one time I think we needed to apply some patch to Sleepycat in
order to turn off transaction logging in slapadd.

Anyway, LDBM works for us - a read-only database which is built
regularly from scratch - so upgrading is a low priority.


And people in that situation can do what they've done for years --
Stick to Windows 95, Windows 98, OpenLDAP 2.0, etc, etc.


...and keep all the other problems that have been fixed since those
releases, and maybe downgrade a bunch of older libraries that the old
release expects. No thanks.


This is an argument to upgrade to back-bdb. Things like aliases don't work in back-ldbm, other new features really won't get in there. Judging from problem reports from 2.1.30 users, back-ldbm still has outstanding IDL bugs which will most likely never be fixed.

If LDBM had been removed, we might also have found the incentive to work
around the BDB bugs we encountered, or to live with the ways BDB was a
poorer solution than LDBM at those times.

In any case, I guess my main point is that BDB still seems rather more
fragile than LDBM.

That seems to me to be a faulty perception. In terms of data integrity, back-ldbm is far more fragile - it's just that the software would never detect when damage had occurred. back-bdb may require more attention to set up properly and maintain, but that is because the design offers more visibility into the actual condition of the data.

--
 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
 http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support