#include <db.h> int DB_ENV->open(DB_ENV *dbenv, char *db_home, u_int32_t flags, int mode);
The DB_ENV->open() method opens a Berkeley
DB environment. It provides a structure for creating a consistent
environment for processes using one or more of the features of
Berkeley DB.
The DB_ENV->open() method
method returns a non-zero error value on failure and 0 on success.
If
DB_ENV->open() fails, the
DB_ENV->close()
method must be
called to discard the DB_ENV
handle.
Using environments with some journaling filesystems might result in log file corruption. This can occur if the operating system experiences an unclean shutdown when a log file is being created. Please see Using Recovery on Journaling Filesystems in the Berkeley DB Programmer's Reference Guide for more information.
The db_home parameter is the database environment's home directory. For more information on db_home, and filename resolution in general, see Berkeley DB File Naming. The environment variable DB_HOME may be used as the path of the database home, as described in Berkeley DB File Naming.
When using a Unicode build on Windows (the default), the db_home argument will be interpreted as a UTF-8 string, which is equivalent to ASCII for Latin characters.
The flags parameter specifies the subsystems that are initialized and how the application's environment affects Berkeley DB file naming, among other things. The flags parameter must be set to 0 or by bitwise inclusively OR'ing together one or more of the values described in this section.
Because there are a large number of flags that can be specified, they have been grouped together by functionality. The first group of flags indicates which of the Berkeley DB subsystems should be initialized.
The choice of subsystems initialized for a Berkeley DB database environment is specified by the thread of control initially creating the environment. Any subsequent thread of control joining the environment will automatically be configured to use the same subsystems as were created in the environment (unless the thread of control requests a subsystem not available in the environment, which will fail). Applications joining an environment, able to adapt to whatever subsystems have been configured in the environment, should open the environment without specifying any subsystem flags. Applications joining an environment, requiring specific subsystems from their environments, should open the environment specifying those specific subsystem flags.
Initialize locking for the
Berkeley DB Concurrent Data Store
product. In this mode, Berkeley DB provides multiple
reader/single writer access. The only other subsystem
that should be specified with the DB_INIT_CDB
flag is DB_INIT_MPOOL.
Initialize the locking subsystem. This subsystem should be used when multiple processes or threads are going to be reading and writing a Berkeley DB database, so that they do not interfere with each other. If all threads are accessing the database(s) read-only, locking is unnecessary. When the DB_INIT_LOCK flag is specified, it is usually necessary to run a deadlock detector, as well. See db_deadlock and DB_ENV->lock_detect() for more information.
Initialize the logging subsystem. This subsystem should be used when recovery from application or system failure is necessary. If the log region is being created and log files are already present, the log files are reviewed; subsequent log writes are appended to the end of the log, rather than overwriting current log entries.
Initialize the shared memory buffer pool subsystem. This subsystem should be used whenever an application is using any Berkeley DB access method.
Initialize the replication subsystem. This subsystem
should be used whenever an application plans on using
replication. The DB_INIT_REP flag
requires the DB_INIT_TXN and
DB_INIT_LOCK flags also be
configured.
You can also specify this flag in the DB_CONFIG configuration file. The syntax is a single line with the string "set_open_flags", one or more whitespace characters, the string "DB_INIT_REP", optionally one or more whitespace characters and the string "on" or "off". If the optional string is omitted, the default is "on"; for example, "set_open_flags DB_INIT_REP" or "set_open_flags DB_INIT_REP on". Because the DB_CONFIG file is read when the database environment is opened, it will silently overrule configuration done before that time.
Initialize the transaction subsystem. This subsystem
should be used when recovery and atomicity of multiple
operations are important. The
DB_INIT_TXN flag implies the
DB_INIT_LOG flag.
The second group of flags govern what recovery, if any, is performed when the environment is initialized:
Run normal recovery on this environment before opening
it for normal use. If this flag is set, the
DB_CREATE and
DB_INIT_TXN flags must also be set,
because the regions will be removed and re-created, and
transactions are required for application recovery.
Run catastrophic recovery on this environment before
opening it for normal use. If this flag is set, the
DB_CREATE and
DB_INIT_TXN flags must also be set,
because the regions will be removed and re-created, and
transactions are required for application recovery.
A standard part of the recovery process is to remove the
existing Berkeley DB environment and create a new one in which
to perform recovery. If the thread of control performing
recovery does not specify the correct region initialization
information (for example, the correct memory pool cache size),
the result can be an application running in an environment with
incorrect cache and other subsystem sizes. For this reason, the
thread of control performing recovery should specify correct
configuration information before calling the
DB_ENV->open() method; or it should
remove the environment after recovery is completed, leaving
creation of the correctly sized environment to a subsequent call
to the DB_ENV->open() method.
All Berkeley DB recovery processing must be single-threaded;
that is, only a single thread of control may perform recovery or
access a Berkeley DB environment while recovery is being
performed. Because it is not an error to specify
DB_RECOVER for an environment for which no
recovery is required, it is reasonable programming practice for
the thread of control responsible for performing recovery and
creating the environment to always specify the
DB_CREATE and DB_RECOVER
flags during startup.
The third group of flags govern file-naming extensions in the environment:
The Berkeley DB process' environment may be permitted to
specify information to be used when naming files; see
Berkeley DB File Naming.
Because permitting users to specify which files are used
can create security problems, environment information
will be used in file naming for all users only if the
DB_USE_ENVIRON flag is set.
The Berkeley DB process' environment may be permitted to
specify information to be used when naming files; see
Berkeley DB File Naming.
Because permitting users to specify which files are used
can create security problems, if the
DB_USE_ENVIRON_ROOT flag is set,
environment information will be used in file naming only
for users with appropriate permissions (for example,
users with a user-ID of 0 on UNIX
systems).
Finally, there are a few additional unrelated flags:
Cause Berkeley DB subsystems to create any underlying files, as necessary.
Lock shared Berkeley DB environment files and
memory-mapped databases into memory.
If the operating systems does not support the
mlock() system call,
then this flag has no effect.
Internally call the
DB_ENV->failchk()
method as part of opening the environment. When
DB_FAILCHK is specified, a check is
made to ensure all
DB_ENV->failchk() prerequisites
are meet.
If the DB_FAILCHK flag is used in
conjunction with the DB_REGISTER
flag, then a check will be made to see if the
environment needs recovery. If recovery is needed, a
call will be made to the
DB_ENV->failchk() method to
release any database reads locks held by the thread of
control that exited and, if needed, to abort the
unresolved transaction. If
DB_ENV->failchk() determines
environment recovery is still required, the recovery
actions for DB_REGISTER will be
followed.
If the DB_FAILCHK flag is not used in
conjunction with the DB_REGISTER
flag, then make an internal call to
DB_ENV->failchk() as the last
step of opening the environment. If
DB_ENV->failchk() determines
database environment recovery is
required,
DB_RUNRECOVERY
will be returned.
Allocate region memory from the heap instead of from memory backed by the filesystem or system shared memory.
Use of this flag means that the environment can only be accessed by one environment handle. The environment cannot be accessed by multiple processes. This is true even if one of those processes is one of the the Berkeley DB utilities. (For example, db_archive, db_checkpoint or db_stat.) Nor can a single process open multiple handles to the environment.
This flag has two effects on the Berkeley DB environment. First, all underlying data structures are allocated from per-process memory instead of from shared memory that is accessible to more than a single process. Second, mutexes are only configured to work between threads.
See Shared Memory Regions for more information.
You can also specify this flag in the DB_CONFIG configuration file. The syntax is a single line with the string "set_open_flags", one or more whitespace characters, the string "DB_PRIVATE", optionally one or more whitespace characters and the string "on" or "off". If the optional string is omitted, the default is "on"; for example, "set_open_flags DB_PRIVATE" or "set_open_flags DB_PRIVATE on". Because the DB_CONFIG file is read when the database environment is opened, it will silently overrule configuration done before that time.
Check to see if recovery needs to be performed before
opening the database environment. (For this check to be
accurate, all processes using the environment must
specify DB_REGISTER when opening the
environment.) If recovery needs to be performed for any
reason (including the initial use of the
DB_REGISTER flag), and
DB_RECOVER is also specified,
recovery will be performed and the open will proceed
normally. If recovery needs to be performed and
DB_RECOVER is not specified,
DB_RUNRECOVERY
will be returned. If recovery does not need to be
performed, the DB_RECOVER flag will
be ignored. See
Architecting Transactional Data Store applications
for more information.
Allocate region memory from system shared memory instead of from heap memory or memory backed by the filesystem.
See Shared Memory Regions for more information.
Cause the
DB_ENV
handle returned by
DB_ENV->open() to be
free-threaded; that is,
concurrently usable by multiple threads in the
address space. The
DB_THREAD flag should be
specified if the DB_ENV
handle will be concurrently used by more than
one thread in the process, or if any
DB handles opened in
the scope of the
DB_ENV handle will be
concurrently used by more than one thread in the
process.
If this flag is specified, then any database opened using this environment handle will also be free-threaded.
Be aware that enabling this flag will serialize calls to DB when using the handle across threads. If concurrent scaling is important to your application we recommend opening separate handles for each thread (and not specifying this flag), rather than sharing handles between threads.
This flag is required when using the Replication Manager.
You can also specify this flag in the DB_CONFIG configuration file. The syntax is a single line with the string "set_open_flags", one or more whitespace characters, the string "DB_THREAD", optionally one or more whitespace characters and the string "on" or "off". If the optional string is omitted, the default is "on"; for example, "set_open_flags DB_THREAD" or "set_open_flags DB_THREAD on". Because the DB_CONFIG file is read when the database environment is opened, it will silently overrule configuration done before that time.
On Windows systems, the mode parameter is ignored.
On UNIX systems or in IEEE/ANSI Std 1003.1 (POSIX) environments, files created by Berkeley DB are created with mode mode (as described in chmod(2)) and modified by the process' umask value at the time of creation (see umask(2)). Created files are owned by the process owner; the group ownership of created files is based on the system and directory defaults, and is not further specified by Berkeley DB. System shared memory segments created by Berkeley DB are created with mode mode, unmodified by the process' umask value. If mode is 0, Berkeley DB will use a default mode of readable and writable by both owner and group.
The DB_ENV->open()
method may fail and return one of the following non-zero errors:
Either the DB_REGISTER flag was specified, a
failure occurred, and no recovery flag was specified, or the
DB_FAILCHK flag was specified and recovery
was deemed necessary.
The version of the Berkeley DB library doesn't match the version that created the database environment.
If the DB_THREAD flag was specified and fast
mutexes are not available for this architecture; The
DB_HOME or TMPDIR
environment variables were set, but empty; An incorrectly
formatted NAME VALUE entry or
line was found; or if an invalid flag value or parameter was
specified.