Berkeley DB
Berkeley DB (BDB) is an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports multiple data items for a single key. Berkeley DB is not a relational database, although it has database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging. BDB runs on a wide variety of operating systems including most Unix-like and Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.
| Original author(s) | Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic of Sleepycat Software |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Sleepycat Software, later Oracle Corporation |
| Initial release | 1994 |
| Stable release | 18.1.40
/ May 29, 2020 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Windows, Unix-like |
| Size | ~1244 kB compiled on Windows x86 |
| Type | Embedded database, NoSQL Database |
| License | Dual licensed (GNU Affero General Public License and proprietary license |
| Website | www |
BDB was commercially supported and developed by Sleepycat Software from 1996 to 2006. Sleepycat Software was acquired by Oracle Corporation in February 2006, who continued to develop and sell the C Berkeley DB library. In 2013 Oracle re-licensed BDB under the AGPL license. and released new versions until May 2020. Bloomberg LP continues to develop a fork of the 2013 version of BDB within their Comdb2 database, under the original Sleepycat permissive license.