Re: Real alternatives to BDB?

[Tony Earnshaw <tonni@hetnet.nl>]

Marten Lehmann skrev, on 27-02-2008 17:42:

[...]

> I read through the backend documentation of openldap and berkeley db is 
> praised as very fast and efficient. Amazing, that berkeleydb is not 
> called stable anywhere in the documentation. And from my experience, bdb 
> is not stable. Whenever you here about bdb, you here about it because a 
> database went corrupt. bdb is just a key/value database that seems to 
> work fine as long it is read-only. Different projects, e.g. subversion, 
> have turned away from bdb and use a different backend.
>
> Often they use SQLite. Since SQLite handles complete table layouts, it 
> would also be possible to create one table with two columns (key and 
> value as in bdb). SQLite shall also be transactional.

In addition to what the other contributors have proffered, it's worth 
noting that Oracle (whilst speaking about SQL databases) purchased the 
BDB author SleepyCat and its products with it. Here's what Oracle says 
about BDB and when and why it should be used:

http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html

> But why is openldap sticking on bdb? Does bdb have any other important 
> features the SQLite doesn't have? Benchmark issues? Replication?
>
> I have to admit, that I'm not using the latest releases of bdb. But I'm 
> using and watching bdb for years and I hardly believe, that it has 
> become stable in the latest release.

When I've followed the advice of the OpenLDAP developers, bdb has always 
been rock stable for me with latest OpenLDAP versions (2.2 through 2.4) 
- and of course, independent of OL, for whatever else of my system's 
utilities (too many to mention) that make use of it.

Best,

--Tonni

--
Tony Earnshaw
Email: tonni at hetnet dot nl