we are writing to the database, and it is only necessary if you run the
    application more than once without first deleting the environment. 
</p>
        <p>
    Finally, notice that we open the database such that it supports
    uncommitted reads. We do this so that some cursor activity later in
    this example can read uncommitted data.  If we did not do this, then
    our <code class="methodname">countRecords()</code> method described later in
    this example would cause our thread to self-deadlock.