Appears in Computing Systems, Volume 4, Number 2
Copyright (c) 1991 by the Regents of
the University of California
Eric H. Herrin II - Raphael Finkel
Spring, 1991
This paper describes qddb, a database program suite that addresses the
common situation in which data are infrequently changed. Searches in the
stable parts of databases are very efficient because they use hash-based
searching through a completely inverted index,
whereas searches in updated sections are less so.
All files used by qddb are in Ascii
format, so they can be easily modified by a knowledgeable user with
a simple text editor.
The Ascii format does not detract significantly from the efficiency of
our database package, and it allows databases to be distributed and completely
portable between architectures.
The qddb suite currently runs under both
BSD and System V 
on a variety of machines.
It is capable of querying large databases on small machines with limited
memory.