DBM Comparisons

Here's a partial table of features the different packages offer:

                         odbm    ndbm    sdbm    gdbm    bsd-db
                         ----    ----    ----    ----    ------
 Linkage comes w/ perl   yes     yes     yes     yes     yes
 Src comes w/ perl       no      no      yes     no      no
 Comes w/ many unix os   yes     yes[0]  no      no      no
 Builds ok on !unix      ?       ?       yes     yes     ?
 Code Size               ?       ?       small   big     big
 Database Size           ?       ?       small   big?    ok[1]
 Speed                   ?       ?       slow    ok      fast
 FTPable                 no      no      yes     yes     yes
 Easy to build          N/A     N/A      yes     yes     ok[2]
 Size limits             1k      4k      1k[3]   none    none
 Byte-order independent  no      no      no      no      yes
 Licensing restrictions  ?       ?       no      yes     no

[0] on mixed universe machines, may be in the bsd compat library, which is often shunned.

[1] Can be trimmed if you compile for one access method.

[2] See the DB_File manpage. Requires symbolic links.

[3] By default, but can be redefined.