Is a DBM dbase built in?

Anon

Hi all,
I bought one of those teach yourself in 24hrs PHP books which seems to indicate that PHP4 has some sort of DBM database creation abilities. My problem is that I've been unable to get my code, which is basically the same as in the book, to work at all. I just get the error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: dbmopen() in E:\Inetpub\webpub\questions.php on line 15

the code is just:

$btgdb = dbmopen("btgdb.db", "c") or die("Could not open DBM");

So can anybody help me? I thought that this would make a database for me to store a really small amount of data in it. I'd rather not use MySQL as it just seems to be too much work to get going when a simple little database can easily handle the job (and I couldn't get it to work at all when I tried 🙂 )

Thanks for the help,
Marvin

Anon

Yes and no.

Good news:

In order to make dbm style databases work, you'll likely have to recompile php with the proper -with-xdbm swtiches, which are:

--with-dbm
--with-ndbm or
--with-gdbm

Bad News:

As of 4.0.3, php seems broken, at least for the --with-gdbm switch (I run Gnu/Linux, so that's the one I need).

Good News:

4.0.0 through 4.0.2 work just fine.

Bad News:

Everything before 4.0.3pl1 has some major security holes regarding file uploads, so if you're doing that on a public web site, you'll have to learn to live without dbm style databases until this bug is fixed

Good News: I just submitted a bug report on it.

Anon

Thanks Scott. It is a public site so I suppose I better get MySQL going then.

Anon

Hold the phone! Just got a note from one of the php developers that you now have to include the --with-db switch as well as your choice(s) of [g:n]dbm manager.

Anon

Thanks for the tip. If I do end up using a DBM type I'll remember that. I've just installed MySQL and it's working really well. I guess it doesn't hurt to brush up on my SQL skills anyway (haven't used them for a while).