Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Building Berkeley DB for UNIX systems

Configuring Berkeley DB

There are several options that you can specify when configuring Berkeley DB. While only the Berkeley DB specific ones are described here, most of the standard GNU autoconf options are available and supported. To see a complete list of the options, specify the --help flag to the configure program.

The Berkeley DB specific options are as follows:

--disable-bigfile

Some systems, notably versions of HP/UX and Solaris, require special compile-time options in order to create files larger than 2^32 bytes. These options are automatically enabled when Berkeley DB is compiled. For this reason, binaries built on current versions of these systems may not run on earlier versions of the system, as the library and system calls necessary for large files are not available. To disable building with these compile-time options, enter --disable-bigfile as an argument to configure.

--enable-compat185

To compile or load Berkeley DB 1.85 applications against this release of the Berkeley DB library, enter --enable-compat185 as an argument to configure. This will include Berkeley DB 1.85 API compatibility code in the library.

--enable-cxx

To build the Berkeley DB C++ API, enter --enable-cxx as an argument to configure.

--enable-debug

To build Berkeley DB with -g as a compiler flag and with DEBUG #defined during compilation, enter --enable-debug as an argument to configure. This will create a Berkeley DB library with debugging symbols, as well as load various routines that can be called from a debugger to display pages, cursor queues and so forth. This option should not be specified when configuring to build production binaries, although there shouldn't be any significant performance degradation.

--enable-debug_rop

To build Berkeley DB to output log records for read operations, enter --enable-debug_rop as an argument to configure. This option should not be specified when configuring to build production binaries, as you will lose a significant amount of performance.

--enable-debug_wop

To build Berkeley DB to output log records for write operations, enter --enable-debug_wop as an argument to configure. This option should not be specified when configuring to build production binaries, as you will lose a significant amount of performance.

--enable-diagnostic

To build Berkeley DB with debugging run-time sanity checks, enter --enable-diagnostic as an argument to configure. This will cause a number of special checks to be performed when Berkeley DB is running. This option should not be specified when configuring to build production binaries, as you will lose a significant amount of performance.

--enable-dump185

To convert Berkeley DB 1.85 (or earlier) databases to this release of Berkeley DB, enter --enable-dump185 as an argument to configure. This will build the db_dump185 utility which can dump Berkeley DB 1.85 and 1.86 databases in a format readable by the Berkeley DB db_load utility.

The system libraries with which you are loading the db_dump185 utility must already contain the Berkeley DB 1.85 library routines for this to work, as the Berkeley DB distribution does not include them. If you are using a non-standard library for the Berkeley DB 1.85 library routines, you will have to change the Makefile that the configuration step creates to load the db_dump185 utility with that library.

--enable-dynamic

To build a dynamic shared library version of Berkeley DB, instead of the default static library, specify --enable-dynamic. Dynamic libraries are built using the GNU Project's Libtool distribution, which supports shared library builds on many, although not all, systems.

Berkeley DB can be configured to build either a static or a dynamic library, but not both at once. You should not attempt to build both library types in the same directory, as they have incompatible object file formats. To build both static and dynamic libraries, create two separate build directories, and configure and build them separately.

--enable-java

To build the Berkeley DB Java API, enter --enable-java as an argument to configure. To build Java, you must also configure the option --enable-dynamic. Before configuring, you must set your PATH environment variable to include javac. Note, it is not sufficient to include a symbolic link to javac in your PATH, because the configuration process uses the location of javac to determine the location of the Java include files (e.g., jni.h). On some systems additional include directories may be needed to process jni.h, see Changing compile or load options for more information.

--enable-posixmutexes

To force Berkeley DB to use the POSIX pthread mutex interfaces for underlying mutex support, enter --enable-posixmutexes as an argument to configure. The Berkeley DB library requires that the POSIX pthread implementation support mutexes shared between multiple processes, as described for the pthread_condattr_setpshared and pthread_mutexattr_setpshared interfaces. In addition, this configuration option requires that Berkeley DB be linked with the -lpthread library. On systems where POSIX mutexes are the preferred mutex support (e.g., HP-UX), they will be selected automatically.

--enable-rpc

To build the Berkeley DB RPC client code and server utility, enter --enable-rpc as an argument to configure. The --enable-rpc option requires that RPC libraries already be installed on your system.

--enable-shared

The --enable-shared configure argument is an alias for --enable-dynamic.

--enable-tcl

To build the Berkeley DB Tcl API, enter --enable-tcl as an argument to configure. This configuration option expects to find Tcl's tclConfig.sh file in the /usr/local/lib directory. See the --with-tcl option for instructions on specifying a non-standard location for the Tcl installation. See Loading Berkeley DB with Tcl for information on sites from which you can download Tcl and which Tcl versions are compatible with Berkeley DB. To configure the Berkeley DB Tcl API, you must also specify the --enable-dynamic option.

--enable-test

To build the Berkeley DB test suite, enter --enable-test as an argument to configure. To run the Berkeley DB test suite, you must also specify the --enable-dynamic and --enable-tcl options.

--enable-uimutexes

To force Berkeley DB to use the UNIX International (UI) mutex interfaces for underlying mutex support, enter --enable-uimutexes as an argument to configure. This configuration option requires that Berkeley DB be linked with the -lthread library. On systems where UI mutexes are the preferred mutex support, (e.g., SCO's UnixWare 2), they will be selected automatically.

--enable-umrw

Rational Software's Purify product and other run-time tools complain about uninitialized reads/writes of structure fields whose only purpose is padding, as well as when heap memory that was never initialized is written to disk. Specify the --enable-umrw option during configuration to mask these errors. This option should not be specified when configuring to build production binaries, as you will lose a significant amount of performance.

--with-tcl=DIR

To build the Berkeley DB Tcl API, enter --with-tcl=DIR, replacing DIR with the directory in which the Tcl tclConfig.sh file may be found. See Loading Berkeley DB with Tcl for information on sites from which you can download Tcl and which Tcl versions are compatible with Berkeley DB. To configure the Berkeley DB Tcl API, you must also specify the --enable-dynamic option.

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