Berkeley DB

From Free net encyclopedia

Berkeley DB (DB) is a high-performance, embedded database library with bindings in C, [[C++]], Java, Perl, Python, Tcl and many other programming languages. DB stores arbitrary key/data pairs, and supports multiple data items for a single key. DB can support thousands of simultaneous threads of control manipulating databases as large as 256 terabytes, on a wide variety of systems including most UNIX-like and Windows systems as well as real-time operating systems.

Berkeley DB is developed by Sleepycat Software (owned by Oracle Corporation). It is available with source code under a free software license. Developers who want to redistribute DB with proprietary applications must license it from Sleepycat.

Berkeley DB includes compatibility interfaces for some historic UNIX database libraries: dbm, ndbm and hsearch.

1 Architecture
2 Programs that use Berkeley DB
3 Licensing
4 External links

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Architecture

Berkeley DB is notable for having a simple architecture compared with other database systems like Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. For example, it does not provide support for network access — programs access the database using in-process API calls. It does not support SQL or any other query language, nor does it support table schema or table columns. A program accessing the database is free to decide how the data is to be stored in a record; DB puts no constraints on the record's data. The record and its key can both be up to four gigabytes long.

Despite having a simple architecture, Berkeley DB supports many advanced database features such as ACID transactions, fine-grained locking, an XA interface, hot backups and replication.

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Programs that use Berkeley DB

Berkeley DB is the underlying storage system of several LDAP servers, database system, and many other commercial and Open Source applications. Below is a list of notable programs that use Berkeley DB for data storage.

MySQL database system - A multithreaded, multi-user, SQL (Structured Query Language) Database Management System (DBMS) with an estimated six million installations. (BDB is one of several data storage backends available for MySQL; others include MyISAM and InnoDB.)
Subversion - A version control system designed specifically to replace CVS
KDevelop - A free C and [[C++]] IDE for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems
Sun GridEngine - An open source distributed resource management system; the most popular batch-queueing job scheduler for compute farms.
Movable Type - A proprietary weblog publishing system developed by California-based Six Apart
Caravel CMS - An open source content management system originally designed for the 2,000+ organizations of the Mennonite Church
OpenLDAP - A free, open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
KLibido - A free, open source Newsgroup reader tailored for binary downloads
Citadel - An open source groupware platform that keeps all of its data stores, including the message base, in Berkeley DB.
Bogofilter - an open source spamfilter that saves its wordlists using Berkeley DB.

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Licensing

Versions 2.0 and higher of Berkeley DB are available under a dual license (see http://www.sleepycat.com/download/licensinginfo.shtml). Versions <2.0 are available under the BSD license, which means free use commercially.

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