Oracle Bolsters Berkeley DB Embeddable Databases

Oracle unveiled new releases of its Berkeley DB and Berkeley DB XML today with a host of performance enhancements and new features.

 With the new Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8 and Oracle Berkeley DB XML 2.5 releases, Oracle has taken aim at enabling developers, independent software vendors and OEMs to deliver high performance, scalable applications. In the case of Berkeley DB 4.8, the company has added support for foreign keys and enhanced locking/latching code.

 "Some lock requests were replaced by latch requests (latches are cheaper -- meaning they require less resources -- than locks)," explained Rex Wang, vice president of product marketing at Oracle. "Further, some exclusive latch requests were replaced with read latch requests.  Since multiple threads/process can concurrently hold a read latch, this improves concurrency, and hence performance."

 Oracle also added a new bulk load and delete APIto improve application performance and C++ Standard Template Library ( STL) integration.

 "The C++ Standard Template Library (S TL) provides many of the standard primitives that simplify the programmer's job," Wang said. " STLis popular and widely used. By providing support for STL, it is easier for the developer to write applications. Similarly, C# is a popular language on the Windows platform. By providing a new C# API, we simplify application development for a large population of Windows developers who use C#."

 In Berkeley DB XML 2.5, Oracle now enables users to extend the behavior of their XQuery statements in the C++, Java or Python APIs. In addition, a smaller on-disk footprint for XML containers can reduce storage requirements and result in a more efficient cache.

 "The Oracle Berkeley DB product family is a great fit for solution developers across the entire spectrum of Windows and . NETplatforms and products, providing a broad spectrum of functionality and performance in a small footprint," said Lucas Vogel, managing partner at Endpoint Systems, in a statement.  "With the C# library, . NETdevelopers now have access to a tried-and-true data storage engine enjoyed for over a decade by UNIX and Java developers. This opens an exciting new chapter in .NE Tdevelopment for applications looking for a solution beyond the boundaries of traditional relational data storage."