Origin
Berkeley DB originated at the University of California, Berkeley as part of the transition (1986 to 1994) from 4.3BSD to 4.4BSD and of the effort to remove AT&T-encumbered code. The first code, due to Seltzer and Yigit, attempted to create a disk hash table that performed better than any of the existing Dbm libraries. In 1996 Netscape requested that the authors of Berkeley DB improve and extend the library, then at version 1.86, to suit Netscape's requirements for an LDAP server and for use in the Netscape browser. That request led to the creation of Sleepycat Software. This company was acquired by Oracle Corporation in February 2006, which continues to develop and sell Berkeley DB.
Since its initial release, Berkeley DB has gone through various versions. Each major release cycle has introduced a single new major feature generally layering on top of the earlier features to add functionality to the product. The 1.x releases focused on managing key/value data storage and are referred to as "Data Store" (DS). The 2.x releases added a locking system enabling concurrent access to data. This is what is known as "Concurrent Data Store" (CDS). The 3.x releases added a logging system for transactions and recovery, called "Transactional Data Store" (TDS). The 4.x releases added the ability to replicate log records and create a distributed highly available single-master multi-replica database. This is called the "High Availability" (HA) feature set. Berkeley DB's evolution has sometimes led to minor API changes or log format changes, but very rarely have database formats changed. Berkeley DB HA supports online upgrades from one version to the next by maintaining the ability to read and apply the prior release's log records.
The FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating system continue to use Berkeley DB 1.8x for compatibility reasons; Linux-based operating systems commonly include several versions to accommodate for applications still using older interfaces/files.
Berkeley DB is redistributed under the Sleepycat Public License, which is an OSI-approved open source license as well as an FSF-approved free software license. The product ships with complete source code, build script, test suite, and documentation. The code quality and general utility along with the licensing terms have led to its use in a multitude of free and open source software. Those who do not wish to abide by the terms of the Sleepycat Public License have the option of purchasing another proprietary license for redistribution from Oracle Corporation. This technique is called dual licensing.
Berkeley DB includes compatibility interfaces for some historic Unix database libraries: dbm, ndbm and hsearch (a System V library for creating in-memory hash tables).
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