* Kiran Kumar M. R.:

No, locking is necessary to ensure the consistency of Berkeley DB's
internal data structures, even if your application can work with
inconsistent data.

1) When BDB is open with out DB_INIT_LOCK, multiple processes can still
update data consistenly. So can one explain why this behaviour exhibted
when INIT_LOCK is necessary?

2)How can i avoid a dead lock when multiple processes access single
instance of BDB?

I have configured the lock matrix as mutex, shown below

NG Read Write
NG 0 0 0
Read 0 1 1
Write 0 1 1

even with this configuration am not able to avoid deadlocks. Pls
suggest an alternative to avoid deadlock when multiple processes access
BDB.

Thanks
Ragha

This has to be a limitation in your test procedures. Perhaps no page
allocation takes place, or something like that.

With TDS, you can use the "Read Comitted" isolation level to avoid
almost all deadlocks in a single writer/multiple readers scenario.

But apart from that, deadlocks are a fact of life you have to deal
with. Make sure that deadlock detection takes place, retry
transactions aborted due to deadlocks, and you should be fine.