aiodbm 0.4.1

An AsyncIO bridge for DBM.

An AsyncIO bridge for Python’s DBM library.

Description

aiodbm is a library that allows you to use DBM in asyncio code.

• Full coverage of Python’s DBM and GDBM API

• Typing support

• Docstrings and documentation

• Fully tested

Why use DBM?

DBM is a fast and easy to use, embedded key-value store. It is supported by Python’s standard library [1] and can be used on most systems without requiring additional dependencies [2].

Compared to Sqlite - the other embedded database supported by Python’s standard library - it is significantly faster when used as key/value store.

According to our measurement we see that aiodbm is about 140x faster on writes and about 3.5x faster on reads [3] on Linux:

So if you are looking for a fast and an easy to use key-value store (e.g. for caching) on Linux systems, DBM can be a good solution. And aiodbm allows you use DBM in your asyncio programs.

Caveats

On non Linux-like systems Python might use it’s “dumb” DBM implementation, which will be much slower.

DBM is not process safe. If you need a key-value store in a multi process context (e.g. a web server running with gunicorn) we’d recommend to use Redis or something similar instead.

Usage

Here is a basic example on how to use the library:

import asyncio

import aiodbm


async def main():
   # opening/creating database
   async with aiodbm.open("example.dbm", "c") as db:

      # creating new key alpha with value green
      await db.set("alpha", "green")

      # fetching value for key alpha
      value = await db.get("alpha")
      print(value)

      # delete key alpha
      await db.delete("alpha")


asyncio.run(main())

Installation

You can install this library directly from PyPI with the following command:

pip install aiodbm

---

Reference

[1]

See also Python’s DBM module: https://docs.python.org/3/library/dbm.html

[2]

The newer DBM variants GDBM or NDBM are preinstalled on most Linux/Unix systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBM_(computing)#Availability

[3]

We compared the asyncio versions with 10.000 write and read operations of key/value pairs on Linux with GDBM. See also measurements folder for more details.