| 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 [1]
/ 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 |
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,[2] 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.
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[3][4] and released new versions until May 2020. Bloomberg L.P. continues to develop a fork of the 2013 version of BDB within their Comdb2 database, under the original Sleepycat permissive license.