Yum Database Errors on Linux

Yum is a well known application, Linux users use this utility to install different applications on their system. YUM is a very stable application and it hardly brakes or gives any errors unless you mess around with its configuration files. You just need to follow standard command to operate Yum and you should be fine. YUM uses RPMs on the backend to complete the installation process. Yum is widely used on all RHEL based operating systems like CentOS, Fedora etc. Let's try to understand Yum's working on Linux systems. Yum has a set of configuration files which contain information about its repositories. Yum repositories are actually the links to the different online sources which are hosting installer files (RPMs) for many applications. Once we request Yum to install anything for us. It goes through all the URLs in its configuration files and finds out the correct links to download and install our specified program or application.

Once user confirms that Yum's selected package is correct, it downloads it to the local system and then installs it. Yum uses a database on the backend to organize and perform such operations. If due to any reason, Yum's running process is killed or interrupted, slight chances are that it will run into following error:

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rror: rpmdb: BDB0113 Thread/process 2597/140075287652160 failed: BDB1507 Thread died in Berkeley DB library error: db5 error(-30973) \from dbenv->failchk: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery error: cannot open Packages index using db5 - (-30973) error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm CRITICAL:yum.main:

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In order to resolve this error, we need to rebuild the RPM database for Yum. Run following command on CentOS Linux operating system to fix this error.

rpm --rebuilddb

After that you can run following command on your Linux system to bring Yum up to date.

yum update