An ASCII Database for Fast Queries of Relatively Stable Data

This paper describes qddb, a database program suite that addresses the common situation in which data are infrequently changed. Searches in the stable parts of databases are very e cient because they use hash-based searching through a completely inverted index, whereas searches in updated sections are less so. All les used by qddb are in Ascii format, so they can be easily modied by a knowledgeable user with a simple text editor. The Ascii format does not detract signi cantly from the e ciency of our database package, and it allows databases to be distributed and completely portable between architectures. The qddb suite currently runs under both BSD and System V Unix TM on a variety of machines. It is capable of querying large databases on small machines with limited memory.