Oracle Berkeley DB is a mature, industry-leading, open source, embeddable, key-value database engine which provides developers with fast, reliable, and local data persistence.
As an embedded database, the Berkeley DB library links directly into your application. After linking with Berkeley DB, your application is able to access data locally through simple function calls, thereby eliminating the performance penalty of network-based protocols commonly used in client-server architectures. Similarly, as Berkeley DB is a non-SQL database, specific data access patterns are able to be defined by the developer. Given the amount of control and options provided by Berkeley DB, developers gain more optimized and predictable access to the data itself.
History
Berkeley DB, initially written by Michael Olson, Keith Bostic, and Margo Seltzer,originated in 1991 at the University of California at Berkeley with the intent of replacing AT&T's dbm library in BSD 4.4. Several years later, Netscape had embedded Berkeley DB in their Netscape Directory Server and required several enhancements regarding recovery, transaction capabilities, and multi-user support. In order to further the development of Berkeley DB, the initial developers founded a company called Sleepycat.
Years later, in 2006, after Berkeley DB had grown into being the most successful open source embeddable database engine, Oracle purchased Sleepycat. Since that time, Oracle has furthered the development of Berkeley DB by adding multi-version concurrency control, on the fly upgrade capabilities, and more.
Editions
Berkeley DB comes in several editions:
- Berkeley DB - A transactional storage engine for un-typed data in basic key/value data structures.
- Berkeley DB Java Edition - A pure Java version of Berkeley DB optimized for the Java environment.
- Berkeley DB XML - A native XML database with XQuery-based access to documents stored in containers and indexed based on their content.
License
Berkeley DB is released under a
dual licensing model.
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