Oracle Juices Up Berkeley DB

Oracle spruced up its recently acquired embeddable database, Berkeley DB, releasing on Sept. 27 Version 4.5 with multiversion concurrency control and more.

The new features are designed to improve performance, availability and ease of use for developers of the open-source database.

One of the major positive items in the update is the ability of developers to upgrade the database without bringing it down. The nonstop upgrades feature targets customers that must have 99.999 percent system uptime.

New multiversion concurrency control gives each user a database snapshot. Designed to improve performance of highly concurrent, mixed read/write systems, the feature allows administrators to manage changes coming in from many users simultaneously.

Another positive item in the update is a replication framework: a place in which users can access prebuilt functions to build replicated or highly available systems.

A statement from Oracle quoted statistics from Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhannas June report on the open-source database market. Yuhanna wrote that as of June 2006 the market measures about $400 million, including support, services and licenses. Forrester predicts the open-source database market will hit $1 billion by the end of 2008.

Oracle Berkeley DB Release 4.5 is generally available under the same dual license that Sleepycat had before Oracle purchased the company. The no-cost open-source license permits redistribution if the application using Oracle Berkeley DB is open-source. A commercial license is available for redistribution of proprietary applications.

Oracle Berkeley DB is available for download at www.oracle.com/technology/products/berkeley-db.