Is Berkeley DB XML a viable database backend?
- by w00t
Apparently, BDB-XML has been around since at least 2003 but I only recently stumbled upon it on Oracle's website: Berkeley DB XML. Here's the blurb:
Oracle Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embeddable XML database with XQuery-based access to documents stored in containers and indexed based on their content. Oracle Berkeley DB XML is built on top of Oracle Berkeley DB and inherits its rich features and attributes. Like Oracle Berkeley DB, it runs in process with the application with no need for human administration. Oracle Berkeley DB XML adds a document parser, XML indexer and XQuery engine on top of Oracle Berkeley DB to enable the fastest, most efficient retrieval of data.
To me it seems that the underlying ideas are technically sound and probably more mature than the newer document-based DBs like CouchDB or MongoDB. It has support for C, C++, Ruby and Perl, as far as I can determine. It even has HA-capabilities like automatic replication using a master/slave model with automatic election.
However, I can't seem to find any projects that use it. Is there something fundamentally wrong with it? Is the license too onerous? Is it too complicated?
Why is it not being used?
