Open-Source DBMS Supports High Availability

Feb. 4, 2002

Developers requiring high performance and high availability need look no further than Berkeley DB 4.0, an open-source database management system (DBMS) from Sleepycat Software. It includes high-availability, single-master replication, and group-commit...

William G. Wong

The Berkeley DB Data Store version provides B+tree, hashed, and record-based data storage and retrieval. Concurrent Data Store adds multi-use read-write access, while Transactional Data Store includes fine-grained locking, transactional commits, and roll back. All versions share a compatible API and are linked with an application. Applications can be migrated to different versions as necessary. A 300-kbyte footprint is small, especially considering its features and performance. Berkeley DB runs on most embedded OSs, including VxWorks, Linux, and QNX.

Sleepycat owns all the software, so it can license it commercially and allow its use in open-source projects like Sendmail and MySQL. Berkeley DB can be included free of charge in open-source projects where the application source code is also provided.

Berkeley DB can be downloaded from Sleepycat's Web site. The standard license model starts at $25,000 with unlimited distribution. Contact Sleepycat for commercial licensing terms.

Sleepycat Software Inc., (617) 876-0858; www.sleepycat.com.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.