Sleepycat Perks Up Berkeley DB Database

The open-source developers' database has been updated with new replication features and efficiency improvements.

Sleepycat Software Inc. has updated Berkeley DB, its flagship open-source developers database, with new replication features and efficiency improvements.

Sleepycat announced on Tuesday that Berkeley DB 4.4 now supports in-memory replication, client-to-client replication, and controls for throttling and delaying synchronization and master election speed-ups.

The update also comes with online Btree compaction and disk space reclamation, online abandoned lock removal, automated recovery serialization and a hot backup utility. In addition, 4.4 also features a transactional application developers guide.

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The companys press release quoted Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB, as saying that Berkeley DB is a good, solid option amongst a medley of storage engines available for MySQLs pluggable storage engine architecture.

"Berkeley DB is very fast and supports ACID transactions, and we continue to collaborate with Sleepycat to ensure our products are well-integrated," Mickos was quoted as saying.

Sources say that MySQL is working with Sleepycat to fine-tune a storage engine that can replace the one that Oracle recently snatched from under its nose. Click here to read more.

Indeed, MySQL may be working especially hard to collaborate with Sleepycat on a viable storage engine for MySQL, given that the storage engine its customers overwhelmingly prefer, InnoDB, was purchased by Oracle in October.

Besides MySQL, Sleepycat has plenty of other fans. Its used by Amazon.com, AOL, Cisco Systems Inc., EMC Corp., Google Inc., Hitachi Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co., for example. Sun Microsystems Inc. also uses Berkeley DB in its software portfolio, in products such as the Sun Java System Portal Server, Identity Manager and Directory Server.

Berkeley DB 4.4 is available immediately and can be downloaded at Sleepycats site. The database is offered under a dual license: a no-cost open-source license that permits redistribution if the application using the database is open source, and a commercial license available that permits redistribution of proprietary applications.

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