Tokyo Cabinet is a library of routines for managing a database. The database is a simple data file containing records, each is a pair of a key and a value. Every key and value is serial bytes with variable length. Both binary data and character string can be used as a key and a value. There is neither concept of data tables nor data types. Records are organized in hash table or B+ tree.
As for database of hash table, each key must be unique within a database, so it is impossible to store two or more records with a key overlaps. The following access methods are provided to the database: storing a record with a key and a value, deleting a record by a key, retrieving a record by a key. Moreover, traversal access to every key are provided, although the order is arbitrary. These access methods are similar to ones of DBM (or its followers: NDBM and GDBM) library defined in the UNIX standard. Tokyo Cabinet is an alternative for DBM because of its higher performance.
As for database of B+ tree, records whose keys are duplicated can be stored. Access methods of storing, deleting, and retrieving are provided as with the database of hash table. Records are stored in order by a comparison function assigned by a user. It is possible to access each record with the cursor in ascending or descending order. According to this mechanism, forward matching search for strings and range search for integers are realized. Moreover, transaction is available in database of B+ tree.
Tokyo Cabinet is written in the C language, and provided as API of C, Perl, Ruby, and Java. Tokyo Cabinet is available on platforms which have API conforming to C99 and POSIX. Tokyo Cabinet is a free software licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
The following are documents of Tokyo Cabinet. They are contained also in the source package.
The following is the source packages of Tokyo Cabinet.
Tokyo Cabinet was written and is maintained by Mikio Hirabayashi. You can contact the author by e-mail to `mikio@users.sourceforge.net'.
The project page on SourceForge.net is `http://sourceforge.net/projects/tokyocabinet/'. Update of this project is announced on Freshmeat.net at `http://freshmeat.net/projects/tokyocabinet/'.