Berkeley DB

Small, special-purpose computing devices and high-end core Internet servers need fast, reliable database management. Berkeley DB is an embedded database that provides high-performance, scalable, transaction-protected and recoverable data management services to applications. Extremely portable, this library runs under almost all UNIX and Windows variants, as well as a number of embedded, real-time operating systems.

Berkeley DB is the ultimate resource for the world's most widely deployed embedded database engine. This book will aid software architects and engineers, product managers, and systems and network administrators without the overhead imposed by other database products.

Designed by programmers for programmers, this classic library style toolkit provides a broad base of functionality to application writers. This book will help you to make intelligent choices about when and how to use Berkeley DB to meet your needs.

You can visit the Sleepycat website to get the latest errata for this book.

NOTE: The first printing of this book contained an error in the table of contents that caused the page numbers to be off. This will be corrected in the second printing. If you have an earlier edition, you can download a pdf of the correct table of contents that you can print out and use with your book. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the editor of this book at [email protected].

Sleepycat Software, Inc. develops, and supports Berkeley DB. Berkeley DB was originally written by Keith Bostic, Mike Olson, Margo Seltzer, and Ozan Yigit in the early 1990s. Keith Bostic, one of the principal developers of the University of California's 4.4BSD UNIX releases, approached Seltzer and Yigit to write an Open Source implementation of the UNIX C library dbm hash package for inclusion in 4.4BSD. They agreed, and created a general-purpose hashing library. Later, Bostic enlisted Olson to add a Btree access method to the package. These two projects were integrated and became the first Berkeley DB release, which was included in the 4.4BSD UNIX and related Net/2 releases.

In the years that followed, Berkeley DB was adopted by an enormous number of both proprietary and Open Source projects. Its high performance, ready availability, and easy-to-use interfaces made it a natural tool for a wide variety of applications.

In 1996, there were enough commercial users of the software to justify the formation of a company to enhance and support it. Bostic and Seltzer formed Sleepycat Software to do this. They spent a year adding critical features to the academic code (most notably, transactions, support for concurrent users, and recoverability), and version 2.0 of Berkeley DB was released by Sleepycat Software in 1997.

Since that initial release, Berkeley DB has been deployed in network switches, email clients, wireless communication systems, mission-critical site-monitoring software, and many other applications.

Sleepycat is an Open Source company, and it is committed to the development and distribution of Berkeley DB as an Open Source product. Sleepycat's license for Berkeley DB permits its use at no charge in Open Source applications.