Berkeley DB

Locking and Non-Berkeley DB Applications

The Locking subsystem is useful outside the context of Berkeley DB. It can be used to manage concurrent access to any collection of either ephemeral or persistent objects. That is, the lock region can persist across invocations of an application, so it can be used to provide long-term locking (for example, conference-room scheduling).

In order to use the Locking subsystem in such a general way, the applications must adhere to a convention for identifying objects and lockers. Consider a conference room scheduling problem, in which there are three conference rooms scheduled in half-hour intervals. The scheduling application must then select a way to identify each conference room/time slot combination. In ...