8.2 KiB
lmdb-safe
A safe modern & performant C++ wrapper of LMDB.
Requires C++17, or C++11 + Boost.
LMDB is an outrageously fast
key/value store with semantics that make it highly interesting for many
applications. Of specific note, besides speed, is the full support for
transactions and good read/write concurrency. LMDB is also famed for its
robustness.. when used correctly.
The design of LMDB is elegant and simple, which aids both the performance and stability. The downside of this elegant design is a nontrivial set of rules that need to be followed to not break things. In other words, LMDB delivers great things but only if you use it exactly right. This is by conscious design.
Among the things to keep in mind when using LMDB natively:
- Never open a database file more than once anywhere in your process
- Never open more than one transaction within a thread
- .. unless they are all read-only and have MDB_NOTLS set
- When opening a named database, no other threads may do that at the same time
- Cursors within RO transactions need freeing, but cursors within RW transactions must not be freed.
- A new transaction may indicate the database has grown, and you need to restart the transaction then.
Breaking these rules may cause no immediate errors, but can lead to silent data corruption, missing updates, or random crashes. Again, this is not an actual bug in LMDB, it means that LMDB expects you to use it according to its exact rules. And who are we to disagree?
The lmdb-safe
library aims to deliver the full LMDB performance while
programmatically making sure the LMDB semantics are adhered to, with very
limited overhead.
Most common LMDB functionality is wrapped within this library but the native MDB handles are all available should you want to use functionality we did not (yet) cater for.
Status
Fresh. If using this tiny library, be aware things might change
rapidly. To use, add lmdb-safe.cc
and lmdb-safe.hh
to your project.
Philosophy
This library tries to not restrict your use of LMDB, nor make it slower, except on operations that should be rare. The native LMDB handles (Environment, DBI, Transactions & Cursors) are all available for your direct use if need be.
When using lmdb-safe
, errors "that should never happen" are turned into
exceptions. An error that merely indicates that a key can not be found is
passed on as a regular LMDB error code.
Example
The following example has no overhead compared to native LMDB, but already exhibits several ways in which lmdb-safe automates LMDB constraints:
auto env = getMDBEnv("./database", 0, 0600);
auto dbi = env->openDB("example", MDB_CREATE);
auto txn = env->getRWTransaction();
The first line requests an LMDB environment for a database hosted in
./database
. Within LMDB, it is not allowed to open a database file more
than once, not even from other threads, not even when using a different
LMDB handle. getMDBEnv
keeps a registry of LMDB environments, keyed to
the exact inode & flags. If another part of your process requests access to
the same inode, it will get the same environment. MDBEnv
is threadsafe.
On the second line, a database is opened within our environment. The
semantics of opening or creating a database within LMDB are tricky. With
some loss of generality, MDBEnv::openDB
will create a transaction for you
to open the database, and close it too. Most of the time this is what you
want. It is also possible to open a database within a transaction manually.
The third line opens a read/write transaction using the Resource Acquisition
Is Initialization (RAII) technique. If txn
goes out of scope, the
transaction is aborted automatically. To commit or abort, use commit()
or
abort()
, after which going out of scope has no further effect.
txn.put(dbi, "lmdb", "great");
string_view data;
if(!txn.get(dbi, "lmdb", data)) {
cout<< "Within RW transaction, found that lmdb = " << data <<endl;
}
else
cout<<"Found nothing" << endl;
txn.commit();
LMDB is so fast because it does not copy data unless it really needs to.
Memory bandwidth is a huge determinant of performance on modern CPUs. This
wrapper agrees, and using modern C++ makes it possible to seemlessly use
'views' on data without copying them. Using these techniques, the call to
txn.put()
sets the "lmdb" string to "great", without making additional
copies.
We employ the same technique to request the value of "lmdb", which is made available to us as a read-only view, straight onto the memory mapped data on disk.
In the final line, we commit the transaction, after which it also becomes available for other threads and processes.
A slightly expanded version of this code can be found in basic-example.cc.
Input and output of values
The basic data unit of LMDB is MDB_val
which describes a slab of memory.
Within LMDB, MDB_val
is used for both input and output. For safety
purposes, in this library we split this up into MDBInValue
and
MDBOutValue
. Once split, we can add some very convenient semantics to these
classes.
For example, to store double
values for 64 bit IDs:
auto txn = env->getRWTransaction();
uint64_t id=12345678901;
double score=3.14159;
txn.put(dbi, id, score);
txn.commit();
Behind the scenes, the id
and score
values are wrapped by MDBInVal
which converts these values into byte strings. To retrieve thise values
works similary:
auto txn = env->getRWTransaction();
uint64_t id=12345678901;
MDBOutValue val;
txn.get(dbi, id, val);
cout << "Score: " << val.get<double>() << "\n";
Note that on retrieval, we have to specify the type of the value stored.
This allows the conversion back from a byte string into the native type.
MDBOutValue
also tests if the length of the data matches the type.
Details
The automatic conversion to and from the MDBVal
s is implemented strictly
for:
- Integer and floating point types
- std::string
- std::string_view
However, if you explicitly ask for it, it is also possible to serialize
struct
s:
struct Coordinate
{
double x,y;
};
C c{12.0, 13.0};
txn.put(dbi, MDBInVal::fromStruct(c), 12.0);
MDBOutVal res;
txn.get(dbi, MDBInVal::fromStruct(c), res);
auto c1 = res.get_struct<Coordinate>();
Cursors, transactions
This example shows how to use cursors and how to mix lmdb-safe
with direct
calls to mdb.
auto env = getMDBEnv("./database", 0, 0600);
auto dbi = env->openDB("huge", MDB_CREATE);
auto txn = env->getRWTransaction();
unsigned int limit=20000000;
This is the usual opening sequence.
auto cursor=txn.getCursor(dbi);
MDBOutVal key, data;
int count=0;
cout<<"Counting records.. "; cout.flush();
while(!cursor.get(key, data, count ? MDB_NEXT : MDB_FIRST)) {
count++;
}
cout<<"Have "<<count<<"!"<<endl;
This describes how we generate a cursor for the huge
database and iterate
over it to count the number of keys in there. We pass two LMDB native
MDB_val
structs to the cursor get
function. These do not get copies of
all the millions of potential keys in the huge
database - they only
contain pointers to that data. Because of this, we can count 20 million
records in under a second (!).
cout<<"Clearing records.. "; cout.flush();
mdb_drop(txn, dbi, 0); // clear records
cout<<"Done!"<<endl;
Here we drop al keys from the database, which too happens nearly
instantaneously. Note that we pass our txn
(which is a class) to the
native mdb_drop
function which we did not wrap. This is possible because
txn
converts to an MDB_env*
if needed.
cout << "Adding "<<limit<<" values .. "; cout.flush();
for(unsigned int n = 0 ; n < limit; ++n) {
txn.put(dbi, n, n);
}
cout <<"Done!"<<endl;
cout <<"Calling commit.. "; cout.flush();
txn.commit();
cout<<"Done!"<<endl;
Here we add 20 million value & then commit the mdb_drop
and the 20 million
puts. All this happened in less than 20 seconds.
Had we created our database with the MDB_INTEGERKEY
option and added the
MDB_APPEND
flag to txn.put
, the whole process would have taken around 5
seconds.