Sleepycat Software has provided MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine. This storage engine typically is called BDB for short. BDB tables may have a greater chance of surviving crashes and are also capable of COMMIT and ROLLBACK operations on transactions.

Support for the BDB storage engine is included in MySQL source distributions starting from version 3.23.34a and is activated in MySQL-Max binary distributions. The MySQL source distribution comes with a BDB distribution that is patched to make it work with MySQL. You cannot use a non-patched version of BDB with MySQL.

We at MySQL AB work in close cooperation with Sleepycat to keep the quality of the MySQL/BDB interface high. (Even though Berkeley DB is in itself very tested and reliable, the MySQL interface is still considered gamma quality. We continue to improve and optimize it.)

When it comes to support for any problems involving BDB tables, we are committed to helping our users locate the problem and create reproducible test cases. Any such test case is forwarded to Sleepycat, which in turn helps 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 storage engines. However, we anticipate no significant difficulties with this procedure because the Berkeley DB code itself is used in many applications other than MySQL.

For general information about Berkeley DB, please visit the Sleepycat Web site, http://www.sleepycat.com/.