Oracle Enhances Oracle® Berkeley DB Embeddable Databases

Open Source Databases Enable Developers, ISVs and OEMs to Deliver High Performance, Scalable Applications
Redwood Shores, CA.- Today, Oracle announced new releases of Oracle® Berkeley DB and Oracle Berkeley DB XML, two members of the Oracle Berkeley DB family of open source, embeddable databases. Developers, ISVs, OEMs and enterprises can integrate Oracle Berkeley DB products directly into their software applications, devices and equipment to deliver high performance, reliability and availability with virtually no human administration.
The new Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8 and Oracle Berkeley DB XML 2.5 releases provide significant performance enhancements, allowing faster processing with less expensive hardware.
New APIs simplify application development and help reduce the amount of time, resources and training required to build a new application.
New features provide increased flexibility for addressing application scalability and on-disk storage requirements.
The enhancements to the Oracle Berkeley DB family reiterate Oracle’s commitment to developing open source software and continuing to provide the leading embeddable database libraries available on the market today.
Enhanced Performance, Scalability and Availability of Critical “Edge” Applications
Oracle Berkeley DB is an embeddable database engine that provides developers with fast, reliable, local persistence of key/value pairs with near-zero administration. New features in release 4.8 include:

Ease of Use
Support for foreign keys – helps guarantee referential integrity and reduce application development efforts;
Improved failure handling for multi-threaded applications – delivers continuous availability;
New DB_SQL utility – speeds development by generating Berkeley DB application code from SQL schema description;
C++ Standard Template Library (STL) integration – helps lower development complexity and cost and shorten time to market;
C#/.NET support – eases development for Windows developers;
Multi-process support in Replication Manager API – simplifies development of highly available applications.

Improved Performance and Scalability
Enhanced locking/latching code – enables significantly improved application performance on SMP systems;
Automatic creation and access to multiple table partitions – improves application throughput;
New bulk load/delete API – improves application performance;
New B-tree compression – reduces disk space and improves performance.
Oracle Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embeddable XML database with XQuery-based access to documents stored in containers and indexed based on their content. Built on top of Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle Berkeley DB XML adds a document parser, XML indexer and XQuery engine to enable faster, more efficient retrieval of data. New features in release 2.5 include:

Ease of Use
Support for external functions – allows users to extend the behavior of their XQuery statements in the C++, Java or Python APIs. This significant usability improvement can also result in considerable performance improvements.

Improved Performance and Scalability
Smaller on-disk footprint for XML containers - can reduce storage requirements by up to 30 percent, resulting in a more efficient cache and better document retrieval performance;
Certification on Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8 – provides Berkeley DB XML 2.5 with its underlying performance and feature enhancements.
Supporting Quotes
“Temporal Wave provides a drop-in replacement for a banking system database used around the world,” said Jim Idle, President, Temporal Wave LLC. “We chose to use Oracle Berkeley DB over all other options because of its performance, scalability, reliability and relative simplicity. Databases used in banking must be very reliable, recover from system related failures very quickly and at the same time provide very high performance for interactive applications. Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8 re-affirms our decision to develop commercial systems with Oracle Berkeley DB, providing on-going advances in many areas for a fraction of the cost of other available options, including writing our own system.”
“The Oracle Berkeley DB product family is a great fit for solution developers across the entire spectrum of Windows and .NET platforms and products, providing a broad spectrum of functionality and performance in a small footprint,” said Lucas Vogel, Managing Partner, Endpoint Systems. “With the C# library, .NET developers 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 .NET development for applications looking for a solution beyond the boundaries of traditional relational data storage.”
“With its key features in the areas of comprehensive replication, distributed transactions support, seamless in-memory on-disk operation modes, sophisticated locking, and more, Oracle Berkeley DB gives application developers control of how data is stored and accessed in the database. Other open source databases don’t even come close,” said Yadav, Principal Engineer, Rohati.