I have been a user of BerkeleyDB prior to the Oracle buyout of the
Sleepycat company, going back ~4 years. At this point, it appears
that Oracle's plans for BerkeleyDB are a valid concern.

I work for a company which has products that compete with some of
Oracle's business products. One of our products uses BerkeleyDB. The
Oracle business salespeople have taken to the tactic of undermining
our product by indicating that BerkeleyDB is inferior technology, and
unreliable. Hence our product is unreliable. They are sowing fear &
doubt about BerkeleyDB. It wouldn't surprise me if the people in
charge of BerkeleyDB at Oracle were surprised by this.

If this trend is likely, then it does seem as if any commercial use of
BerkeleyDB is probably unwise. I wanted to pass this experience along
to the general public.

On Feb 15, 11:17 am, mostlyharmles... (AT) yahoo (DOT) com wrote:

Hello,

I very much appreciate you bringing this matter to our attention. I'm
the development director for Berkeley DB within Oracle. I can assure
you that Berkeley DB a robust, well tested and widely deployed
database kernel that is being actively developed within Oracle. I
would strongly encourage Berkeley DB adoption within commercial
applications.

I cannot comment on the statements made to you by the salespeople, but
I'll be happy to help out and provide the necessary clarification
internally if you'd like to contact me directly.

Warm regards.
ashok joshi
Director, Berkeley DB development
Oracle.

On Mar 5, 10:22 am, "ashok" <ashokjo... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

That is my personal opinion also. The product is robust, and based on
sound principles. One has only to look through the source code to
address doubts about the product's technical merits.

The problem that I am concerned with is a business problem, not a
technical one. Since the buy-out of Sleepycat by Oracle, there has
been general concern about what Oracle is going to to do with
BerkeleyDB. Speculation reigns. "Will it be depricated? Was it
bought only to prevent MySQL from having a solid transactional
foundation (as with InnoDB)?" and so on.

Our customers have begun to echo this fear, uncertainty & doubt, which
makes it difficult for us to base our solutions on that technology.
The notion that some of the Oracle salespeople (from the business
product line) are undermining the product is not something that I have
directly observed. It has been passed along by customers who have
been informed (by someone they considered authoritative) that
BerkeleyDB is "inferior technology" and unsuitable for use in
commercial applications.