Sleepycat has updated its venerable open source database, adding high availability (HA) and performance features such as in-memory replication. Berkeley DB 4.3 targets software for telecommunication and enterprise datacenter infrastructure demanding 99.999% carrier-grade availability. It runs on Linux and most every other OS.

Sleepycat calls Berkeley DB the “most widely used open source developer database,” with more than 200 million deployments worldwide. The High Availability version first supported the OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux 1.1 feature set in March of 2003, and it was certified for use with MontaVista Carrier Grade Linux in July of this year.

According to Sleepycat, the new 4.3 version of Berkeley DB offers optional in-memory transaction logging, said to enable fast system failovers in distributed databases, because disks need not be accessed to restore the session.

Additional new features include:

• Level 2 isolation for improved transaction throughput
• Repeatable reads as well as committed reads (level 1 isolation)
• Automatic initialization of replication clients, making it easier to set up a fault-tolerant system
• Native support for sequence number generation, said to eliminate a hotspot that commonly limits application scalability

SleepyCat says Openwave has already used the new version of Berkeley DB in its Email MX product, claimed to be capable of processing 1.5 billion messages per day.

Sleepycat CEO Mike Olson, an open source advocate, said, “We're continuing to push Berkeley DB deeper into mission-critical environments.”

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.