Oracle Berkeley DB - $5,800.00 per processor | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Berkeley DB - $5,800.00 per processor

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22 pointsedward12 comments

Link bait title,

It's a dual license product. That price is only if you want to buy a commercial license distribute it with proprietary software to third parties. Their open source license allows you to use it on your server or in open source projects under a GPLish license.

BDB doesn't get near enough love as far as I'm concerned. It's crazy fast, and it's been around for two decades and it can scale to 256 Terabytes.

ref: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB

IIRC, Yahoo did not use the newer versions of BDB because even running it on their own servers came with a huge (multimillion-dollar) license cost. They stayed with some eldritch version for this reason. Perhaps the new Oracle regime is less onerous.

The page you link to is carefully worded:

"The following are not redistribution: Building an application for use internal to your organization, deployed and managed on your company servers."

This does not appear to include using BDB on your public-facing web application.

Wow, I used berkeley db pre-oracle acquisition a few jobs back -- we got an awesome support contract for 10k a year and deployed it on hundreds of servers -- and people like Keith Bostic replied to support emails when we found bugs!

I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for Berkeley DB, even though Tokyo Cabernet doesn't offer all the same features, the combination of Tokyo and better distributed systems like Cassandra/MongoDB are certainly pushing down into the market in which I would want to use BDB.

The BerkeleyDB engineers are still very responsive on forums, even if you pay them absolutely nothing. They are still able to maintain a "Sleepycat" culture and it's amazing how well involved their engineers remain with the customers. That being said, the current prices (for a support contract) do seem unreasonable: what if I'd just like support, but not a commercial license?

Distributed systems can be built upon BDB, we've had very good luck with using BerkeleyDB-Je in Voldemort. Many services within Yahoo and Amazon use custom distributed systems built upon BerkeleyDB. BerkeleyDB's own distribution, however, seems to just not be the right model for most people (HA "floating master" with Paxos elections). We (as did Amazon in the original Dynamo paper) found it easier to build their own replication, using BDB as one of the storage options.

Tokyo Tyrant is great if your data fits into memory. If it doesn't, performance declines without any grace (compare with BerkeleyDB where the performance remains reasonable with a 5:1 data:RAM ratio and surprisingly usable even with a 10:1 ratio).

That being said, there are some interesting alternative models e.g., Basho's bitcask, but it solves a different problem (purely K/V lookups vs. a B+Tree or -- with BDB-Je -- a log structured B+Tree).

I really wish there was a C/C++ based (at least until the Azul GC enhancements or the G1 collector become mainstream, making it possible to have a cache of over 10-15gb without pauses) log-structured B+Tree implementation... perhaps I'll get bored and write a toy one one day.

I had no idea they grew Cabernet grapes in Japan. Certainly something to check out!

Berkeley DB has always (i.e. before being bought by Oracle) been released under a GPL-like license with the option to purchase a commercial licenses for those that don't want to deal with the reciprocity clauses.

The commercial license is only needed if you intend to link against it in a commercial project (they specifically exempt using bindings for a dynamic language from "linking") or buy support. Otherwise, it's free for use in open source (it's compatible with both ASL and GPL) or internal projects.

By my memory (I googled for it and can't find it) the dynamic language exemption was because in their opinion using their API from a dynamic language was not really linking, and hence didn't need copyright permission. But the license doesn't say anything at all about that.

Now that the people who interpreted the license don't have control, and Oracle's lawyers do, I would not be entirely confident that the past interpretation of the license will necessarily be the future interpretation. The fact that I can't easily find anything documenting the old interpretation on Oracle's site does not give me comfort on this score.

remember: steak & strippers don't come free, even if code can

What a steal...

in for 2

Yeah, but you get a lot for those fifty-eight thousand: you get classic Oracle support, which is priceless in many ways.

For one thing, Oracle has always been good at imposing completely arbitrary 1000-column limits on databases that are probably scalable to far more. So with a really scalable database like Berkeley DB, just imagine what they can do!

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