Architecture
Btrieve is not a relational database management system (RDBMS). Early descriptions of Btrieve referred to it as a record manager (though Pervasive initially used the term navigational database but later changed this to transactional database) because it only deals with the underlying record creation, data retrieval, record updating and data deletion primitives. It uses ISAM as its underlying indexing and storage mechanism. A key part of Pervasive's architecture is the use of a MicroKernel Database Engine, which allows different database backends to be modularised and integrated easily into their DBMS package, Pervasive.SQL. This has allowed them to support both their Btrieve navigational database engine and an SQL-based engine, Scalable SQL.
Current versions of Btrieve support system transactions and user transactions, where system transactions are a bundle of non-transactional operations and/or user transactions, while user transactions are transactions that work on actual data in the database. System transactions were developed to allow multiple transactions to be done in a batch and to allow the ability to recover data more easily.
The Btrieve file format consists entirely of pages, which are the data that moves between memory and storage media when the engine performs an I/O operation. Versions prior to 6.0 merely used data pages, index pages and a file control record (FCR). The file had an index for searching that linked to physical pages. Beginning with version 6.0 logical pages started to be used, which are pages that are mapped to physical pages (pages at a fixed location in the file) on the disk through the use of a set of page allocation tables (PATs). The FCR is a record that contains important information about Btrieve files, such as the number of pages in current use. In order to avoid corruption in the database Btrieve uses two methods of updating records: pre-image paging in Btrieve versions before 6.0 and shadow paging in subsequent versions. It was mainly the change-over from pre-image paging to shadow-paging that caused radical file format changes that broke compatibility between version 6 and previous versions.
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