Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: history.dbm contents?
Message-ID: <1991May14.143350.13347@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 14 May 1991 14:33:50 GMT
References: <62955@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <62955@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> heiby@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) writes:
>...and an entry is made to the DBM history file
>using the message-id as the key and the file offset into the text
>history file of the line describing the article as the data.
>
>While it might be really handy for some software that has a message-id
>and wants to convert that to pathname(s) or such to have that info in
>the DBM file that way, I can't find any software that actually makes
>use of that information...

Some of the readers do.  They want to look up articles by message ID;
the only quick way to do that is to use the dbm/dbz index to locate the
article's history line.

>BTW, has anyone done any speed comparisons between "good old" dbm and
>GNU dbm? ...

It's kind of pointless, since dbz blows the doors off both of them for
this application, and keeps much smaller files to boot.
-- 
And the bean-counter replied,           | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"beans are more important".             |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry