The environment regions, including any backing files, are removed. Any log or database files and the environment directory are not removed.

If there are processes that have called Open(String, DatabaseEnvironmentConfig) without calling Close()()() (that is, there are processes currently using the environment), Remove fails without further action.

Calling Remove should not be necessary for most applications because the Berkeley DB environment is cleaned up as part of normal database recovery procedures. However, applications may want to call Remove as part of application shut down to free up system resources. For example, if SystemMemory was specified to Open(String, DatabaseEnvironmentConfig), it may be useful to call Remove in order to release system shared memory segments that have been allocated. Or, on architectures in which mutexes require allocation of underlying system resources, it may be useful to call Remove in order to release those resources. Alternatively, if recovery is not required because no database state is maintained across failures, and no system resources need to be released, it is possible to clean up an environment by simply removing all the Berkeley DB files in the database environment's directories.

In multithreaded applications, only a single thread may call Remove.