Maucci, Cyrille wrote: That would be a misnomer in this case. OpenLDAP MDB is not an in-memory DB. In-memory DBs *only* use RAM in their normal operation, and an auxiliary procedure is used to make backups, replicas, or whatever other mechanism is used to write a copy of the data onto persistent storage. In-memory DBs generally use memory-oriented data structures (like AVL trees, red-black trees, or T-trees) to store their data, and do no I/O in normal operation. OpenLDAP MDB uses Single-Level Store. The data may reside in RAM or on disk, and the application and DB library don't know and don't care, the OS pages data in or out as needed. The data structure is a disk-oriented structure, a B+tree. I/O calls are used routinely in write operations; the database is always fully persistent without need of any auxiliary persistence mechanisms. The difference in semantics is quite significant; the SLS approach is far superior to a pure in-memory DB when transactional persistence is required. A pure in-memory DB (with no persistence layer) would tend to have a much higher write throughput than our MDB, since our persistence is integral and cannot be switched off. In-memory DBs with persistence require fully loading the data from secondary storage into RAM before they can be operated on, which entails a very significant startup delay. MDB has no such requirement, and the startup delay is near zero. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Michael Ströder wrote: I'm not sure that we need to change the name; I was asking the question. back-whatever is of course unambiguous, in OpenLDAP. "MDB" itself will be used in other contexts. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Quick answer: Don't know. Longer: It'd be nice to do if that would avoid most nameclashes, but as Michael says, <letter>db will clash. E.g. I thought of sdb (single-level store) or odb (Openldap's DB). But they clash with OpenOffice databases which is perhaps worse than with Microsoft stuff. .mmdb (Memory Mapped DB) seems mostly unused, but perhaps 4-letter .exts still remain messier than clashes with other applications' .exts. -- Hallvard