"Export dbm" program

  > "Dale S. Johnson" <dsj at merit.edu> writes:
  > Has anyone looked at a program that would make an external representation
  > of a dbm file, so that that file could be ftp'd, archived, etc. without
  > passing on gigs of zeros?

External representation is easy: Use your favourite compress program. 
When decompressing you need a little program that seeks over "blocks" of
consecutive 0s unless you have a lot of disk space.  Of course you will
have to specify which DBM package was used generating the index files!

  > Also, has there been philosophical discussion about whether the ftp file
  > is cut (e.g.) once per day, or whether it is linked to the active .db
  > file?  

Yes, you were there!  The conclusion I remember was: Cut it once a day
and provide a trail of the deltas separately with monotonously
increasing serial numbers.  It was suggested that the serial numbers
could encode time. 

Daniel



-------- Logged at  Tue Dec 13 19:56:09 MET 1994  ---------