Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment, Third Edition

20. A Database Library

20.1. Introduction

During the early 1980s, the UNIX System was considered a hostile environment for running multiuser database systems. (See Stonebraker [1981] and Weinberger [1982].) Earlier systems, such as Version 7, did indeed present large obstacles, since they did not provide any form of IPC (other than half-duplex pipes) and did not provide any form of byte-range locking. Many of these deficiencies were remedied, however. By the late 1980s, the UNIX System had evolved to provide a suitable environment for running reliable, multiuser database systems. Since then, numerous commercial firms have offered these types of database systems.

In this chapter, we develop a simple, multiuser database library of C functions ...