Introduction to stores

A store is a collection of streams and is a fundamental part of the operating system.

Stores are used to implement the persistence of objects. Typically, a store is a file, although an in-memory store is provided. A store can also be embedded as a stream within another store; this is a more advanced aspect of stores.

For many purposes, stores replace the direct use of files and the file server client side API, although other features of the file server are still relevant. Stores are a key building block for the application architecture because they provide the support necessary for embedded documents.

The basic behaviour of stores is encapsulated by the CStreamStore class and provides the core abstract framework that allows streams to be manipulated. Each class derived from CStreamStore implements the parts of the API that are appropriate.

A number of stores are defined that build on CStreamStore. Some of the most important are: CPersistentStore, CFileStore, CDirectFileStore, CPermanentFileStore, CEmbeddedStore, CBufStore. Each has various capabilities.

A store is also the basis of the relational database provided by DBMS.