Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Debugging Applications

Introduction

As Berkeley DB is an embedded library, debugging applications that use Berkeley DB is both harder and easier than debugging a separate server. Debugging can be harder, because, when a problem arises, it is not always readily apparent whether the problem is in the application, in the database library, or is a result of an unexpected interaction between the two. Debugging can be easier, as it is easier to track down a problem when you can review a stack trace rather than deciphering inter-process communication messages. This chapter is intended to assist you in debugging applications and in reporting bugs to us in a manner such that we can provide you with the correct answer or fix as quickly as possible.

When you encounter a problem, there are a few general actions you can take:

Review the Berkeley DB error output

If an error output mechanism has been configured in the Berkeley DB environment, additional run-time error messages are made available to the applications. If you are not using an environment, it is well worth modifying your application to create one so that you can get more detailed error messages. See Run-time error information for more information on configuring Berkeley DB to output these error messages.

Review DBENV->set_verbose

Check the list of flags for the DBENV->set_verbose function, and see if any of them will produce additional information that might help understand the problem.

Add run-time diagnostics

You can configure and build Berkeley DB to perform run-time diagnostics. (These checks are not done by default as they can seriously impact performance. See Compile-time configuration for more information.

Apply all available patches

Before reporting a problem to Sleepycat Software, please upgrade to the latest Sleepycat Software release of Berkeley DB, if possible, or at least make sure you have applied any updates available for your release from the Sleepycat Software web site.

Run the test suite

If you are seeing repeated failures, or failures of simple test cases, run the Berkeley DB test suite to determine if the distribution of Berkeley DB you are using was built and configured correctly.

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