[pkg-db-devel] Berkeley DB plan for future

[Ondřej Surý]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 21:27, Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> * Ondřej Surý:
>
>> if your package depends on libdbX.Y you probably want to at least look at it:
>>
>> http://wiki.debian.org/BerkeleyDB
>> http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/BerkeleyDB
>
> Are you in touch with upstream in some way?

Just the Oracle forum. But I know some people ex-Solaris here, I may
try to ask them for help to get in touch with right people.

> In my experience, Oracle
> has consistently ignored bug reports discovered by Debian users.  (See
> #510270 for a particularly annoying example.)  I think the
> fragmentation issue which plague large database on most Linux file
> systems hasn't been addressed, either.

We can always cook up an open letter about Oracle not cooperating
nicely together with the Debian PR machine... and send it to LWN,
Slashdot, ... :)

> I fear that without a better relationship with upstream, many
> applications should probably be switched over to SQLite, which has
> much better backwards compatiblity, is largely self-tuning, and takes
> care of the nitty-gritty details of crash recovery in a much saner
> way.  (It does come with starkly reduced write concurrency and less
> performance in some cases, though.)

Well, if the upstream is not cooperative we can always create a "nice"
description to the Berkeley DB packages discouraging users to use it.
And applications are doing that - the cyrus-imapd still has a support
for Berkeley DB, but as a default it uses skiplist everywhere.

> I write this as someone who runs
> a cluster of Berkeley DB databases with a gross size of hundreds of
> gigabytes. 8-/

I might know the answer, but I must ask - there is a free
co-maintainer seat, wanna join? :)

O.
-- 
Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org>