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HASH(3)			    Library Functions Manual		       HASH(3)

NAME
       hash -- hash database access method

SYNOPSIS
       #include	<sys/types.h>
       #include	<db.h>

DESCRIPTION
       The  routine  dbopen() is the library interface to database files.  One
       of the supported	file formats is	hash files.  The  general  description
       of  the	database  access methods is in dbopen(3), this manual page de-
       scribes only the	hash specific information.

       The hash	data structure is an extensible, dynamic hashing scheme.

       The access method specific data structure provided to dbopen()  is  de-
       fined in	the <db.h> include file	as follows:

       typedef struct {
	       u_int bsize;
	       u_int ffactor;
	       u_int nelem;
	       u_int cachesize;
	       uint32_t	(*hash)(const void *, size_t);
	       int lorder;
       } HASHINFO;

       The elements of this structure are as follows:

       bsize   The  bsize  element defines the hash table bucket size, and is,
	       by default, 4096	bytes.	It may be preferable to	 increase  the
	       page  size  for disk-resident tables and	tables with large data
	       items.

       ffactor
	       The ffactor element indicates a desired density within the hash
	       table.  It is an	approximation of the number of keys allowed to
	       accumulate in any one bucket, determining when the  hash	 table
	       grows or	shrinks.  The default value is 8.

       nelem   The  nelem element is an	estimate of the	final size of the hash
	       table.  If not set or set too  low,  hash  tables  will	expand
	       gracefully  as  keys are	entered, although a slight performance
	       degradation may be noticed.  The	default	value is 1.

       cachesize
	       A suggested maximum size, in bytes, of the memory cache.	  This
	       value  is  only	advisory,  and the access method will allocate
	       more memory rather than fail.

       hash    The hash	element	is a user defined  hash	 function.   Since  no
	       hash  function  performs	equally	well on	all possible data, the
	       user may	find that the built-in hash function does poorly on  a
	       particular  data	 set.  User specified hash functions must take
	       two arguments (a	pointer	to a byte string and a length) and re-
	       turn a 32-bit quantity to be used as the	hash value.

       lorder  The byte	order for integers in the  stored  database  metadata.
	       The  number should represent the	order as an integer; for exam-
	       ple, big	endian order would be the number 4,321.	 If lorder  is
	       0  (no  order is	specified) the current host order is used.  If
	       the file	already	exists,	the specified value is ignored and the
	       value specified when the	tree was created is used.

       If the file already exists (and the O_TRUNC flag	is not specified), the
       values specified	for the	bsize, ffactor,	lorder and nelem arguments are
       ignored and the values specified	when the tree was created are used.

       If a hash function is specified,	hash_open() will attempt to  determine
       if  the	hash  function specified is the	same as	the one	with which the
       database	was created, and will fail if it is not.

       Backward	compatible interfaces to the older dbm and ndbm	 routines  are
       provided,  however  these  interfaces  are not compatible with previous
       file formats.

ERRORS
       The hash	access method routines may fail	and set	errno for any  of  the
       errors specified	for the	library	routine	dbopen(3).

SEE ALSO
       btree(3), dbopen(3), mpool(3), recno(3)

       Per-Ake	Larson,	 Dynamic Hash Tables, Communications of	the ACM, April
       1988.

       Margo Seltzer, A	New Hash Package for UNIX, USENIX Proceedings,	Winter
       1991.

BUGS
       Only big	and little endian byte order is	supported.

FreeBSD	15.0			August 18, 1994			       HASH(3)

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