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The Association for Computing Machinery's publication, ACM Queue, had Kirk McKusick of FreeBSD fame interview Margo Seltzer and Mike Olson about the development of Berkeley DB. The two, along with Keith Bostic, have been awarded the 2020 ACM Software System Award for the database. Berkeley DB is a dual-licensed (AGPL and proprietary), simple, efficient, transactional, nosql database and currently maintained by Oracle.
Kirk McKusick: Berkeley DB came out of the University of California at Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group's work to create a version of Unix unencumbered by AT&T's ownership rights to the original version of Unix. To do that, we needed a new kernel, written without using any of the AT&T code. We also needed all the applications and libraries that shipped with the operating system.
My colleague on the Berkeley BSD Project, Mike Karels, and I were in charge of getting a clean version of the kernel—that's another story! But Keith Bostic took on the task of getting all the apps and libraries done. He solicited volunteers for much of that work. I know he worked with you two on that. Why don't you start the story there?
Berkeley DB has been around since 1991 and can be found in many places, including inside OpenLDAP. In its 30 years, it has raised public awareness of non-relational databases. It is in general one of the more useful, reliable, and long-lived software projects around.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:09AM (1 child)
It has provided transaction support for a long time. There are some old USENIX proceedings from 1999 on BerkeleyDB by Bostic, Olson, and Seltzer [usenix.org], back when it was still at Sleepycat. Section 3.10.4 addresses locking and transactions, and transactions are named in several other sections, but there are no sections which are just about them alone.
The dual licensing (AGPL/proprietary) means that the BSDs will have trouble with it, but the two good things that come out of that are that the code is available and it looks like Oracle has a way to make at least some money off of it. I'm not sure that offsets the harm that occurred by acquisition from Oracle though.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:18AM
This post of yours is quality.
Almost as good as aristachus' posts. ;)