Table of Contents
In Berkeley DB, a database is a collection of records. Records, in turn, consist of key/data pairings.
	Conceptually, you can think of a 
		Database
		 
	as containing a two-column table where column 1 contains a key and column 2
	contains data.  Both the key and the data are managed using 
		DatabaseEntry 
		
		
		class instances
		
	(see Database Records for details on this 
	    class
	    ).
	So, fundamentally, using a DB 
		Database 
		 
	involves putting, getting, and deleting database records, which in turns involves efficiently 
	managing information 
		encapsulated by 
		
		
		DatabaseEntry 
		
		
		
		objects.
		
	The next several chapters of this book are dedicated to those activities.
  
Also, note that in the previous section of this book, Programming with the Direct Persistence Layer, we described the DPL The DPL handles all database management for you, including creating all primary and secondary databases as is required by your application. That said, if you are using the DPL you can access the underlying database for a given index if necessary. See the Javadoc for the DPL for more information.
        You open a database by instantiating a Database
        object.
    
Note that by default, DB does not create databases if they do not already exist. To override this behavior, set the creation property to true.
The following code fragment illustrates a database open:
package db.GettingStarted;
import com.sleepycat.db.DatabaseException;
import com.sleepycat.db.Database;
import com.sleepycat.db.DatabaseConfig;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
...
Database myDatabase = null;
...
try {
    // Open the database. Create it if it does not already exist.
    DatabaseConfig dbConfig = new DatabaseConfig();
    dbConfig.setAllowCreate(true);
    myDatabase = new Database ("sampleDatabase.db",
                               null, 
                               dbConfig); 
} catch (DatabaseException dbe) {
    // Exception handling goes here
} catch (FileNotFoundException fnfe) {
    // Exception handling goes here
}