Re: Berkeley DB is a non-relational high-performance system/paradigm - anyone looked at it?

Keith Bostic wrote:

>
> To be absolutely clear -- the problems with Subversion were NOT 
> problems or bugs in Berkeley DB, they were the result of incompatible 
> interfaces between two software components.
>
> I don't want to turn this into a marketing presentation, but given how 
> this conversation started, I think it's fair for me to give you a 
> couple of examples: Berkeley DB is the database engine behind Sun 
> Microsystems LDAP directory server, Google' s replicated Single Sign 
> On service, Openwave's Email Mx product and the Amazon web site.
>
> Yes, that's right: when you log into Amazon, that customized page you 
> see is built by roughly 1,000 accesses to Berkeley DB databases. And 
> when you log into Google's gmail, your account information is stored 
> in Berkeley DB.
>
> And, I can promise you two things: first, that every one of those 
> products has a lot more than 1 thread or process accessing data at a 
> time, and second, that every one of these companies wouldn't be using 
> my technology if there was better or more reliable technology available!


I am surprised by the fact that Google uses BDB. In the following recent 
article

http://lwn.net/Articles/194667/

Google's Greg Stein says that they use their own system, called Bigtable:

"A Bigtable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of
structured data. The system is designed to manage several petabytes of
data distributed across thousands of machines, with very high update and
read request rates coming from thousands of simultaneous clients. This
architecture allows Google to scale Subversion up to meet the
demands of storage and concurrency it believes will be needed to serve
its members. According to Google's Greg Stein, “The existing two
back-ends for Subversion (Berkeley DB and flat files) just do not have
the capability to scale to our needs. The Bigtable system also gives us
things like failover, monitoring, and performance tuning capabilities
that are not present in the standard Subversion back-ends.”"

Daniele

-- 
Dr Daniele Turi
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
ESNW 1.17 Kilburn Building, Oxford Road
Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
Tel +44 (0) 161 275 0675
Fax                 6204
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~dturi

Received on Thursday, 2 November 2006 12:14:21 UTC