Oracle’s new Sleepycat awakens

Oracle is putting another of its acquisitions to work, as company officials announced today the release of its first version of the core Berkeley DB embedded database since acquiring the software through its February purchase of open-source developer Sleepycat Software.

First developed in 1991, Berkeley DB is the core version of the Sleepycat embedded database, but the open-source vendor had also begun offering Java and XML versions of its database in recent years. Oracle also plans a refresh of Berkeley DB XML shortly.

Touted in Berkeley DB release 4.5 are the ability for users to upgrade or patch a replicated Berkeley DB without having to take the entire system down, multi-version concurrency controls to handle simultaneous multiple database changes, and a replication framework.

Oracle representatives reported that Oracle research and development was investigating opportunities to get Berkeley DB to work with the Oracle product portfolio, but offered no concrete results.

Unlike other areas of its business, notably applications, where Oracle is looking to consolidate disparate products into a single code base, the vendor’s approach to the embedded database market is rather different. As well as Berkeley DB, Oracle has its TimesTen In-Memory Database and Oracle Database Lite 10g and the company can also embed its higher end Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g software. Berkeley DB is complementary to Oracle’s other embedded databases, but differs in having no SQL layer and is able to store data in memory or on disk.