Berkeley DB

Do You Need Berkeley DB?

Berkeley DB is an ideal database system for applications that need fast, scalable, and reliable embedded database management. For applications that need different services, however, it can be a poor choice.

First, do you need the ability to access your data in ways you cannot predict in advance? If your users want to be able to enter SQL queries to perform complicated searches that you cannot program into your application to begin with, you should consider a relational engine instead. Berkeley DB requires a programmer to write code in order to run a new kind of query.

On the other hand, if you can predict your data access patterns up front—and in particular if you need fairly simple key/value lookups—Berkeley DB is a ...