TurboDB Engine Documentation

Databases

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TurboDB supports two different types of databases.

Single-File vs. Directory Database

Directory Database

Directory databases are folders on a hard disk where all TurboDB database objects reside in different files. Database directories have been supported ever since TurboDB exists.

Single-File Database

A single-file database is one single file which contains all database objects of the database. Such a database file has the default extension of *.tdbd. Single-file databases are supported as of version 4.0. Single-file databases have the advantage of being very easy to deploy or just to copy and move around on your hard disk. The advantage of database directories is, that they are slightly faster and that you can share tables between different databases.

Single-file databases are implemented using a virtual file system layer by dataweb. This layer maps the database objects either to different files in a database directory or to a single database file. dataweb offers a tool - the dataweb Compound File Explorer - which can open such database files and show the content. You may also move database objects from and to the database file. This is a way to convert a directory-based database to a single-file database or vice versa as well.

While TurboDB Native supports both of these database types, TurboDB Managed can only work with single-file databases.

Databases with Catalogs

In previous versions TurboDB databases were just a collection of database tables stored in separate files. While this approach has the advantage of being able to share database tables between databases, it also has some disadvantages. One disadvantage is, that a table name cannot always be resolved, because the table file may be located in a folder far away. Another one is, that multiple passwords are required to open the database, if the tables are encrypted in different ways.

For this reason TurboDB Win 5 introduced databases with catalogs, which store a list of tables and additional database-wide properties. Catalogs are most useful for dictionary databases. With singe-file databases, the above disadvantages do either not exist or are less problematic.

TurboDB Managed supports only single-file databases and keeps track of all necessary information by itself. It does therefore not offer an explicit catalog support.

Note: Databases with catalogs were called managed databases in previous versions but the term conflicts with TurboDB Managed .