Sameer Parwani

As mentioned in a recent post, Tokyo Cabinet is a highly performant key/value store. Its speed leaves MySQL and other RDBMS’s in the dust because it replaces their overhead with highly optimal data structures such as hash tables. Please check the link above for more detail. If you are looking to get more performance out of your system, Tokyo Cabinet is worth trying out.

The process for installing Tokyo Cabinet is very simple. Here is what I did on CentOS 5, starting with a few required libraries:

# Tokyo cabinet requires gzip and bzip
yum install gzip bzip2 bzip2-devel

I then proceeded to download and install the underlying Tokyo Cabinet

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/tokyocabinet/tokyocabinet-1.4.20.tar.gz
tar zxf tokyocabinet-1.4.20.tar.gz
cd tokyocabinet-1.4.20
./configure
make
make install

On top of Tokyo Cabinet lies Tokyo Tyrant:

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/tokyocabinet/tokyotyrant-1.1.26.tar.gz
tar zxf tokyotyrant-1.1.26.tar.gz
cd tokyotyrant-1.1.26
./configure
make
make install

Tokyo Cabinet supports four types of databases: hash, B+ tree, fixed-length, and table. Each type uses different commands, for example the commands that allows you to create, update, and read from a database are tchmgr, tcbmgr, tcfmgr, and tctmgr respectively.

The following shows how to create a hash database and manipulate it from the command line:

[root]# tchmgr create db.tch
[root]# tchmgr put db.tch key1 value1
[root]# tchmgr put db.tch key2 value2
[root]# tchmgr list db.tch
key1
key2
[root]# tchmgr get db2.tch key1
value1

Keep in mind Tokyo Cabinet’s database file extensions must match the type of the database.

• .tch - Hash
• .tcb - B+ tree
• .tcf - Fixed-length
• .tct - Table

In my next post, I will show how to connect to your Tokyo Cabinet database using PHP through Tokyo Tyrant.