Examining Berkeley DB files from the CLI
LinuxCommand Line-InterfaceBerkeley DbLinux Problem Overview
I have a set of Berkeley DB files on my Linux file system that I'd like to examine.
What useful tools exist for getting a quick overview of the contents? I can write Perl scripts that use BDB modules for examining them, but I'm looking for some CLI utility to be able to take a look inside without having to start writing scripts.
Linux Solutions
Solution 1 - Linux
Use the db_dump program. It is contained in the package core/db (Arch), db-util (Debian, Ubuntu), sys-libs/db (Gentoo, note that here the binary is called db4.8_dump or whatever version you are using).
On some systems the man pages are not installed, in that case the documentation can be found here. By default, db_dump outputs some hex numbers, which is not really useful if you are trying to analyse the content of a database. Use the -p argument to change this.
Show everything that’s in the file database.db:
db_dump -p database.db
List the databases in the file database.db:
db_dump -l database.db
Show only the content of the database mydb in the file database.db:
db_dump -p -s mydb database.db
Solution 2 - Linux
Check out the db-utils package. If you use apt, you can install it with the following: apt-get install db-util (or apt-get install db4.8-util or whatever version you have or prefer.)
Additional links:
Solution 3 - Linux
I found @strickli's answer to be the most helpful, as I didn't want to add any new packages to the machine with the database I was on. However, the db file I was reading was of type btree, not hash, so I had to use bsddb
# file foo.db
foo.db: Berkeley DB (Btree, version 9, native byte-order)
# python
>>> import bsddb
>>> for k, v in bsddb.btopen("*<db filename here...>*").iteritems():
... print k,v
...
Solution 4 - Linux
As mentioned in the other answers, the db-utils package (db4-utils under RHEL) has some tools. However, db_dump can be unhelpful, since the output is 'bytevalue' format.
For a quick'n'dirty viewer, use python:
me@machine$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Sep 26 2013, 20:03:06)
>>> import dbhash
>>> for k, v in dbhash.open( *<db filename here...>* ).iteritems(): print k, v
...
Note that dbhash is deprecated since python 2.6.
Solution 5 - Linux
The db_hotbackup utility creates "hot backup" or "hot failover" snapshots of Berkeley DB database environments. Install it with the following
apt-get install db-util
then run following command to take hot backup
db_hotbackup [-cDEguVv] [-d data_dir ...] [-h home] [-l log_dir] [-P password] -b backup_dir
Solution 6 - Linux
Once you have installed the db utils you can simple do a db_dump on the db file.
Solution 7 - Linux
Note that the initial answer says to use "db-utils" package, but the example shows the correct "db-util" package. (with no "s")
Solution 8 - Linux
Under Amazon Linux you can install it with:
yum install db43-utils
Solution 9 - Linux
Python 3
from bsddb3 import db
import collections
d = db.DB()
d.open('./file.dat', 'dbname', db.DB_BTREE, db.DB_THREAD | db.DB_RDONLY)
d.keys()
collections.OrderedDict((k, d[k]) for k in d.keys())