Learning the Metakit database

Metakit is an embeddable database library which was created by the Netherlands based programmer Jean-Claude Wippler (Note that he is also one of the authors of TclKit, so it's no surprise that these two technologies are commonly used together.). In this section, we are going to explain how it works. This information is not crucial for building the standalone binaries, so you may skip it, but we do recommend that you take the time to get more familiar with it for at least one reason—whenever you use the TclKit, you will already have a Metakit within easy reach, so it is always useful to know about the possibilities it offers.

Metakit's main features are:

• Extreme portability—the entire database is stored in one file

• Platform independence—the file containing the database can be used directly on any other platform (such as Unix, Windows, Macintosh, and others) without any conversion

• High efficiency in typical operations, thanks to the specific internal format

• The...