Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Introduction
What can you do with Berkeley DB?
Berkeley DB was designed to provide industrial-strength database services to application developers, without requiring them to become database experts. It is a classic C library style toolkit, providing a broad base of functionality to application writers. Berkeley DB was written by programmers, for programmers: its modular design surfaces simple, orthogonal interfaces to core services, and it provides mechanism (for example, good thread support) without imposing policy (for example, the use of threads is not required). Just as importantly, Berkeley DB allows developers to balance performance against the need for crash recovery and concurrent use. An application can use the storage structure that provides the fastest access to its data and can request only the degree of logging and locking that it needs.
Berkeley DB is powerful enough to use as the underlying support for large network servers and simple enough to use in a fast-prototype for a single-user application. There are many large, complex, multi-threaded servers running on fast, multi-processor machines, depending on Berkeley DB transaction semantics for recovery after system or application failure.
Most Berkeley DB applications fall into two categories: basic data management and data management with recovery. In basic data management, applications use the Berkeley DB access methods to manage their data without concern for application or system failure. The only Berkeley DB interfaces necessary for this purpose are the Access Method and Cursor interfaces. In data management with recovery, applications add calls to the transaction subsystem, in order to ensure complete recoverability in the face of application or system failure.
Generally, both of these categories involve linking Berkeley DB into the process' address space. It is also possible to implement client-server models using Berkeley DB. In such cases, application writers use Berkeley DB to implement the server as described above, and then select an IPC mechanism which the client will use to talk to the server. (The Berkeley DB distribution does not include an IPC mechanism, and it is up to the application writer to implement this functionality.)
While Berkeley DB's primary purpose is to provide a complete database environment to applications, it is important to realize that Berkeley DB includes general-purpose shared memory buffer-pool and general-purpose lock manager interfaces, among others. These interfaces are directly useful to application writers that may have no interest in databases.
Additionally, because of the tool-based approach and separate interfaces for each subsystem, you can support a complete transaction environment for other system operations, e.g., Berkeley DB allows you to wrap transactions around the standard UNIX read/write operations! Further, Berkeley DB was designed to interact correctly with the UNIX toolset, a feature no other database package offers. For example, Berkeley DB supports "hot backups" (database backups while the database is in use), and you can use the standard UNIX tools to do those backups, e.g., dump(1), tar(1), cpio(1), pax(1) or even cp(1).
Finally, because scripting languages interfaces are available for Berkeley DB (notably Python, Tcl and Perl), application writers can build incredibly powerful database engines with little effort, (e.g., you can build transaction-protected database applications using your favorite scripting languages, an increasingly important feature in a world using CGI scripts to deliver HTML).
