Tokyo Cabinet is a library of routines for managing a database. The database is a simple data file containing records, each is a pair of a key and a value. Every key and value is serial bytes with variable length. Both binary data and character string can be used as a key and a value. There is neither concept of data tables nor data types. Records are organized in hash table, B+ tree, or fixed-length array.

Tokyo Cabinet is developed as the successor of GDBM and QDBM on the following purposes. They are achieved and Tokyo Cabinet replaces conventional DBM products.

    * improves space efficiency : smaller size of database file.
    * improves time efficiency : faster processing speed.
    * improves parallelism : higher performance in multi-thread environment.
    * improves usability : simplified API.
    * improves robustness : database file is not corrupted even under catastrophic situation.
    * supports 64-bit architecture : enormous memory space and database file are available.

Tokyo Cabinet is written in the C language, and provided as API of C, Perl, Ruby, Java, and Lua. Tokyo Cabinet is available on platforms which have API conforming to C99 and POSIX. Tokyo Cabinet is a free software licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Tokyo Cabinet was written and is maintained by Mikio Hirabayashi. You can contact the author by e-mail to `mikio@users.sourceforge.net'.

Launchpad site is used to federate the community around the port of Tokyo Cabinet to the Windows and C++ plateforms.