TileDB - Rust Bindings

Rust bindings for TileDB. (currently covering ~56% of the TileDB C API).

Getting Started

Using these bindings requires having a copy of libtiledb installed on your system where pkg-config can find it. There are many different ways this can be accomplished. Building from source is shown below for clarity. For other installation methods, see the TileDB documentation.

In this example, I'm using /opt/tiledb for the installation location. You are free to use any path you so desire.

$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/tiledb
$ sudo chown your_username /opt/tiledb
$ git clone https://github.com/TileDB-Inc/TileDB tiledb
$ cd ~/tiledb/
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../bootstrap --enable=s3,serialization,debug --prefix=/opt/tiledb
$ make -j$(nproc)
$ make -j$(nproc) install

Once built, make sure that your PKG_CONFIG_PATH includes the path where libtiledb was installed:

if [[ ":$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:" != *":/opt/tiledb/lib/pkgconfig:"* ]]; then
  export "PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${PKG_CONFIG_PATH:+${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:}/opt/tiledb/lib/pkgconfig"
fi

Note

The snippet above likely looks overly complicated for setting an environment variable. The reason for this is that cargo will invalidate cached builds if any of the inputs change, including the value of PKG_CONFIG_PATH. The shell weirdness above just ensures that we don't add duplicates to the path which can cause unnecessary rebuilds of anything that transitively depends on tiledb-sys.

An easy way to check if your Rust environment is causing a bunch of unnecessary build churn is by using sub-shells:

$ cargo build
$ zsh # or whatever your shell happens to be
$ cargo build

If that second cargo build command causes anything at all to be built, you likely have something in your environment that's being mutated on every invocation.

Finally, we can check that everything compiled and can be discovered by pkg-config:

$ pkg-config tiledb --libs
-L/opt/tiledb/lib -ltiledb

Creating Static Binaries

Warning

Generally speaking, you likely want to be using dynamically linked libtiledb unless you're working on distributing binaries.

To build tiledb-rs with static linkage to TileDB, you just need to have a copy of libtiledb_static.a located in the lib directory where TileDB is installed. The easiest way to accomplish this is to download a static package from the nightlies release.

If you're interested in how to generate libtiledb_static.a, you can find that logic in the Nightly TileDB Packages workflow in .github/workflows/packages.yml.