Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Berkeley DB Interfacing

Python comes with the bsddb package, which wraps the Berkeley Database (also known as BSD DB) library if that library is installed on your system and your Python installation is built to support it. With the BSD DB library, you can create hash, binary-tree, or record-based files that generally behave like persistent dictionaries. On Windows, Python includes a port of the BSD DB library, thus ensuring that module bsddb is always usable. To download BSD DB sources, binaries for other platforms, and detailed documentation on BSD DB itself, see http://www.sleepycat.com.

Simplified and Complete BSD DB Python Interfaces

Module bsddb itself provides a simplified, backward-compatible interface to a subset of BSD DB’s functionality, as covered by the Python online documentation at http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/lib/module-bsddb.html. However, the standard Python library also comes with many modules in package bsddb, starting with bsddb.db. This set of modules closely mimics BSD DB’s current rich, complex functionality and interfaces, and is documented at http://pybsddb.sourceforge.net/bsddb3.html. At this URL, you’ll see the package documented under the slightly different name bsddb3, which is the name of a package you can separately download and install even on very old versions of Python. However, to use the version of this package that comes as part of the Python standard library, what you need to import are modules named bsddb.db and the like, not bsddb3.db and the ...