Re: Berkeley DB (was: Points of order on this WG)

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:58 AM, Doug Schepers<schepers@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi, Maciej-
>
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote (on 6/26/09 1:49 AM):
>>
>> As a side note, it should be noted Berkeley DB itself could not be used
>> by WebKit or Gecko to implement the spec, because even though it is open
>> source, the license is not compatible with the LGPL. It seems unlikely
>> that non-open-source browser engines could use it either, unless they
>> are willing to pay Oracle for a commercial license. So it's very
>> important for the spec to be clear and detailed, because everyone will
>> have to implement it from scratch.
>
> I wonder if Oracle would be willing to back the Berkeley DB option by
> changing the license?

I don't think we should tie a web API to a specific library. Just as I
think specifying a SQL storage to exactly follow a given version of
SQLite, I would think it's a bad idea to follow a given version of
Berkeley DB.

The idea isn't to use BDB specifically. The idea is to provide the
type of data structures that SQL databases use to implement their
tables.

Berkeley DB used to be available as a backend to MySQL, so clearly it
is possible to implement SQL on top of BDB. However it appears that
MySQL no longer is able to run on top of BDB, so there is probably a
reason for that too.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 08:08:49 UTC