MySQL Manual
7 MySQL Table Types
7.6.1 Overview of BDB Tables
BerkeleyDB, available at http://www.sleepycat.com/ has provided
MySQL with a transactional storage engine. Support for this storage engine is
included in the MySQL source distribution starting from version 3.23.34 and is
activated in the MySQL-Max binary. This storage engine is typically 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.
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 help our
users to locate the problem and help creating 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 storage engines.
However, as the BerkeleyDB code itself has been used by many other
applications than MySQL, we don't envision any big problems with
this. See section 1.4.1 Support Offered by MySQL AB.
