Oracle Unveils New Open Source BerkeleyDB Release

Mark Brunelli writes to tell us that Oracle has released the newest version of the open source Oracle BerkeleyDB Java Edition. From the article: "The new release of the Java embeddable database is the third to come out in three years and the first new version to come out of Sleepycat Software since Oracle purchased the open source stalwart back in February. Rex Wang, Oracle's vice president of embedded systems and a former vice president of marketing at Sleepycat, said the latest release lets Java developers take advantage of a new Persistence application programming interface (API) that provides greater flexibility and new performance optimizations that enable applications to run faster."

Comments

Re:"high-performance" Java?

[JebusIsLord]

oh for chrissakes don't turn this into a "java is slow" argument. 1996 called, and they want their discussion back.

Re:Many using SQLite instead.

[hey!]

I think you hit the nail on the had here.

If you are a database person, as opposed to a programmer who needs some kind of persistent store, database implies the prsence of certain abstractions that BDB doesn't have. It's the abstractions that matter, because they implement a kind of data reusability. This is a big aspect of databases that programmers don't always appreciate, but if you remmber the early adoption days of the relational model (as I do), the idea of abstracting data from its application was a big thing. We had methods already after all for managing storage: hash tables, b trees, record pointers. We even had models (the hierarchical model). But relational databases allow you to create a model of your data that is abstracted from what you are doing with it.

I'd go so far as to say that absracting data for reusability is what distinguishes a true database from other kinds of collections of data. Of course people do use words in a vague way, but this property definitely separates out what is unquestionably a datbase from what is only arguably a database.

There is no question of BDB being a database management system. Collections of data in BDB format might arguably be databases depending on the effort the programmer went through, but usually they're just indexed files.

Things like SQLLite that implement a generaly query and data manipulation language (e.g. including but not limited to SQL) is clearly a database management system, although it may not be a very good one.