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Berekely DB Gets An Oracle Refurbish

Berkeley DB can now be patched while it's still running. It's the type of "nonstop" feature that's been sought by Berkeley DB users for years and placed at the front of the development roadmap by Sleepycat, former owner of the embedded database system. The release of the 4.5 version, including the non-stop feature, is a sign that Oracle is heeding that roadmap. Oracle acquired privately held Sleepycat in February for an undisclosed amount.

Skeptics at the time said Oracle would suppress Berkeley DB development in favor of its existing embeddable systems, which include the Times Ten In-Memory database, Oracle Lite, a mobile application database, and Oracle 10g itself. But Oracle's intentions have been made clearer as it let both the former Sleepycat development team and a community of open source contributors continue to add features to the core system. The 4.5 release also includes improvements in multiversion concurrency, or the ability of the system to respond to multiple users who want information from the database at the same time that it's being updated.

In addition, Berkeley DB now comes with a replication framework that makes it easier to establish a replication system, where a central database keeps satellite versions in sync. It's a self-maintaining system, meant to built into an application, configured and then allowed to run without a database administrator or other human intervention.


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