Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

5.7. Other Server-Side Techniques

Before we finish up this chapter, we touch on a couple of other techniques for storing state information on the server side of the connection.

5.7.1. Non-DBI Databases

Because of its portability, the DBI database interface is probably the right choice for most server-side database applications. However, any database system that was designed to support multiple write access will work for this application. For example, the object-oriented ACEDB system that Lincoln works with is well suited to applications that require complex, richly interlinked information to be stored. The database is freeware; you can find out more about it at http://stein.cshl.org/AcePerl/.

You might be tempted to try to store session information using a Unix NDBM, GDBM, or DB_FILE database. If you try this, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise. These databases were designed for good multiuser read performance but not for transactions in which several processes are reading and writing simultaneously. They keep an in-memory cache of a portion of the database and don't immediately know when another process has updated a portion that's cached. As a result, the database can easily become corrupt if multiple Apache daemons open it for writing.

You can work around this problem by carefully locking the files, flushing after each write, and closing and reopening the file at strategic points, but believe us, it isn't worth it. Version 2 of the Berkeley DB library does support ...