"Bogdan Sarbu" <bcs (AT) sarnet (DOT) dk> wrote

Berkeley DB simply stores arbitrary chunks of binary data, so your
application needs to serialize/marshal your C++ objects into that
form.

There are various ways to do this, each with its own
convenience/speed/data-size/complexity tradeoffs. Or you can roll
your own (we did, as it's such a critical layer). I'd recommend
searching on ASN.1, YAML, XML object persistence, C++ persistence,
etc. Also, I think someone at www.boost.org is working on a
persistence library but I'm not sure if it's done yet or just in the
discussion phase.

Chris

Chris, thank for your reply.
I´m new to this stuff and want a better understanding.
Just to get this right: I can store records, containing a key/data pair, in
the DB. Where the data item is a binary string of an arbitrary lenght,
right? So I have to serialize my objects to a binary string and save the
string as the data item?

/Bogdan



"Chris Newcombe" <chrisn (AT) valvesoftware (DOT) com> wrote

Bogdan Sarbu <bcs (AT) sarnet (DOT) dk> wrote:

You don't strictly *have*to* do it that way, but yes, that's the usual
way you would do it.

The task becomes rather "interesting" once you want to serialize
objects that contain pointers to each other. This is a rather
interesting field of its own, but not really the business of this
particular newsgroup.
--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker (AT) physik (DOT) rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.