The Db.close method flushes any cached database information to disk,
closes any open cursors, frees any allocated resources, and closes any
underlying files. Since key/data pairs are cached in memory, failing to
sync the file with the Db.close or Db.sync method may result
in inconsistent or lost information.
The flags parameter must be set to 0 or the following value:
The Db.DB_NOSYNC flag is a dangerous option. It should only be set
if the application is doing logging (with transactions) so that the
database is recoverable after a system or application crash, or if the
database is always generated from scratch after any system or application
crash.
It is important to understand that flushing cached information to disk
only minimizes the window of opportunity for corrupted data.
While unlikely, it is possible for database corruption to happen if a
system or application crash occurs while writing data to the database.
To ensure that database corruption never occurs, applications must either:
use transactions and logging with automatic recovery, use logging and
application-specific recovery, or edit a copy of the database,
and, once all applications using the database have successfully called
Db.close, atomically replace the original database with the
updated copy.
When multiple threads are using the Berkeley DB handle concurrently, only a single
thread may call the Db.close method.
Once Db.close has been called, regardless of its return, the
Db handle may not be accessed again.
The Db.close method throws an exception that encapsulates a non-zero error value on
failure, and returns Db.DB_INCOMPLETE if the underlying database still has
dirty pages in the cache. (The only reason to return
Db.DB_INCOMPLETE is if another thread of control was writing pages
in the underlying database file at the same time as the
Db.close method was called. For this reason, a return of
Db.DB_INCOMPLETE can normally be ignored, or, in cases where it is
a possible return value, the Db.DB_NOSYNC option should probably
have been specified.)
The Db.close method throws an exception that encapsulates a non-zero error value on
failure.
Errors
The Db.close method may fail and throw an exception for errors specified for other Berkeley DB and C library or system methods.
If a catastrophic error has occurred, the Db.close method may fail and throw
a DbRunRecoveryException, in which case all subsequent Berkeley DB calls
will fail in the same way.