document updated 16 years ago, on Jul 3, 2008
Since Berkeley DB is a lower-level database than RDBMSs, there's an enormous amount of flexibility in how you set up the database. Some design decisions include:
- database model: hierarchical, relational,
object,
network
- a hierarchical database is easy to build... the keys can be structured like a directory path, and the B+-tree features can allow run-time enumeration of sub-keys.
- homogenous vs hetereogenous
- homogenous — every record in a table uses the same well-defined schema
- heterogenous — one table can contain records of a number of different schemas; the number of schemas may also be dynamic and change over time