MySQL Reference Manual

BDB or Berkeley_DB Tables

Overview of BDB Tables

Support for BDB tables is included in the MySQL source distribution starting from Version 3.23.34 and is activated in the MySQL-Max binary.

BerkeleyDB, available at http://www.sleepycat.com/, has provided MySQL with a transactional table handler. BerkeleyDB tables may have a greater chance of surviving crashes, and also provide COMMIT and ROLLBACK on transactions. The MySQL source distribution comes with a BDB distribution that has a couple of small patches to make it work more smoothly with MySQL. You can’t use a non-patched BDB version with MySQL.

We at MySQL AB are working in close cooperation with Sleepycat to keep the quality of the MySQL/BDB interface high.

When it comes to supporting BDB tables, we are committed to helping our users locate the problem and create a reproducible test case for any problems involving BDB tables. Any such test case will be forwarded to Sleepycat, who in turn will help us find and fix the problem. As this is a two-stage operation, any problems with BDB tables may take a little longer for us to fix than for other table handlers. However, as the BerkeleyDB code itself has been used by many other applications, we don’t envision any big problems with this. See Section 1.4.1.

Installing BDB

If you have downloaded a binary version of MySQL that includes support for BerkeleyDB, simply follow the instructions for installing a binary version of MySQL. See Section 2.2.7, and Section 4.7.5.

To compile MySQL with BerkeleyDB ...