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35 <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="databaseLimits"></a>Database Limits and Portability</h2>
40 Berkeley DB provides support for managing everything from very small
41 databases that fit entirely in memory, to extremely large databases
42 holding millions of records and terabytes of data. DB databases can
43 store up to 256 terabytes of data. Individual record keys or record
44 data can store up to 4 gigabytes of data.
47 DB's databases store data in a binary format that is portable across
48 platforms, even of differing endian-ness. Be aware, however, that
49 portability aside, some performance issues can crop up in the event that
50 you are using little endian architecture. See <a class="xref" href="btree.html#comparators" title="Setting Comparison Functions">Setting Comparison Functions</a>
54 Also, DB's databases and data structures are designed for concurrent
55 access — they are thread-safe, and they share well across multiple
56 processes. That said, in order to allow multiple processes to share
57 databases and the cache, DB makes use of mechanisms that do not work
58 well on network-shared drives (NFS or Windows networks shares, for
59 example). For this reason, you cannot place your DB databases and
60 environments on network-mounted drives.
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