Chris Adams <linux <at> cmadams.net> writes: > > Once upon a time, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 <at> gmail.com> said: > > My understanding of the problem is that it's less about the "doubts > > about its future" and more about the fact Oracle inexplicably changed > > the license with BDB 6.x to AGPLv3. Berkley DB 5.3 is old, and no one > > has forked it and maintained it. > > To me, it seems like it would be less work to maintain an already > implemented database (BDB) than to start from scratch. I understand > that nobody is happy with Oracle and their license change, but that > doesn't affect the version already in use in many places. If even a > couple of the current BDB users (say, OpenLDAP and RPM) had stepped up, > it probably wouldn't be that much work, but instead, everybody seems > intent on re-inventing their own wheels (and spending more effort in the > process). > We "reinvented the wheel" with LMDB for multiple reasons, both technical and political. 1) BerkeleyDB is a large code base. 1.7MLOCs https://www.openhub.net/p/berkeleydb . LMDB is only 7KLOCs 2) BerkeleyDB includes a large number of features that are irrelevant to OpenLDAP (hash DBs, replication, multiple other access methods). LMDB is strictly a B+tree. 3) BerkeleyDB is slow, and requires extensive, complex tuning to wring any glimmer of performance out of it. LMDB requires no tuning and is orders of magnitude faster. 4) BerkeleyDB is fragile, and even a slight misconfiguration can render its transaction logs useless for crash recovery. LMDB is crash-proof by design, and that design has held up in the real world. 5) BerkeleyDB lives under a licensing cloud. Since 2008 Oracle lawyers were contacting commercial OpenLDAP users and demanding license fees from them, even though BerkeleyDB is expressly licensed for free use in open source software (such as OpenLDAP). Even if we forked BerkeleyDB and maintained it ourselves, Oracle's lawyers would continue to illegitimately harass OpenLDAP users. LMDB has been in use since 2011. At this point it has saved tremendous administration and maintenance cost, both for us (Symas and OpenLDAP Project) and for all the other projects that have adopted it. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/ -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
