14.5. The BDB (BerkeleyDB) Storage Engine
Sleepycat Software has provided MySQL with the Berkeley DB
transactional storage engine. This storage engine typically is
called BDB for short. BDB
tables may have a greater chance of surviving crashes and are also
capable of COMMIT and
ROLLBACK operations on transactions.
Support for the BDB storage engine is included
in MySQL source distributions is activated in MySQL-Max binary
distributions. The MySQL source distribution comes with a
BDB distribution that is patched to make it
work with MySQL. You cannot use a non-patched version of
BDB with MySQL.
We at MySQL AB work in close cooperation with Sleepycat to keep
the quality of the MySQL/BDB interface high. (Even though Berkeley
DB is in itself very tested and reliable, the MySQL interface is
still considered gamma quality. We continue to improve and
optimize it.)
When it comes to support for any problems involving
BDB tables, we are committed to helping our
users locate the problem and create reproducible test cases. Any
such test case is forwarded to Sleepycat, which in turn helps us
find and fix the problem. As this is a two-stage operation, any
problems with BDB tables may take a little
longer for us to fix than for other storage engines. However, we
anticipate no significant difficulties with this procedure because
the Berkeley DB code itself is used in many applications other
than MySQL.
For general information about Berkeley DB, please visit the
Sleepycat Web site, https://www.sleepycat.com/.
