Oracle has introduced new releases of Oracle Berkeley DB and Oracle Berkeley DB XML, two members of the Oracle Berkeley DB family of open source, embeddable databases.
Oracle Berkeley DB is an embeddable database engine that provides developers with fast, reliable, local persistence of key/value pairs with near-zero administration. New ease-of-use features in Oracle Berkeley DB release 4.8 include support for foreign keys; as well as improved failure handling for multi-threaded applications. A new DB_SQL utility speeds development by generating Berkeley DB application code from SQL schema description; C++ Standard Template Library (STL) integration helps lower development complexity and cost and shorten time to market; C# and .NET support eases development for Windows developers; and multi-process support in Replication Manager API simplifies development of highly available applications.
For improved performance and scalability in Oracle Berkeley DB release 4.8, enhanced locking/latching code enables improved application performance on SMP systems; and automatic creation and access to multiple table partitions improves application throughput. Additionally, a new bulk load/delete API improves application performance; and new B-tree compression reduces disk space and improves performance.
Oracle Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embeddable XML database with XQuery-based access to documents stored in containers and indexed based on their content. Built on top of Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle Berkeley DB XML adds a document parser, XML indexer and XQuery engine to enable faster, more efficient retrieval of data. In Oracle Berkeley DB XML 2.5, ease of use improvements include support for external functions, allowing users to extend the behavior of their XQuery statements in the C++, Java or Python APIs. This usability improvement can also result in considerable performance improvements, according to Oracle.
In the area of improved performance and scalability for Oracle Berkeley DB XML 2.5, smaller on-disk footprint for XML containers can reduce storage requirements by up to 30%, resulting in a more efficient cache and better document retrieval performance. Certification on Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8 provides Berkeley DB XML 2.5 with its underlying performance and feature enhancements.
For more on the Oracle Berkeley DB product family, go here.