BDB | !BDB?

I mentioned a few posts ago that there doesn't seem to be many NoSQL databases around anymore - at least last time I looked a year or two ago, all the buzz from a decade ago had gone away. Various libraries became proprietary-commercial or got abandoned.

For some reason I can't remember I went looking for BerkeleyDB alternatives and hit this stackoverflow question which points to some of them.

So I guess I was a little mistaken, there are still a few around, but not all are appropriate for what I want it for:

• Unstructured ones are a pain to use;
• Many don't do full ACID;
• Most don't handle multi-process concurrency; or
• Written in exotic languages i'm not interested in having a dependency on.

I guess the best of those is LMDB - i'd come across it whilst using Caffe but never looked into it. Given it's roots in replacing BDB it has enough similarities in API and features to be a good match for what I want (and written in a sane language) although a couple of niggles exist such as the lack of sequences and all the fixed-sized structures (and database size). Being a part of a specific project (OpenLDAP) means it's hit maturity without features that might be useful elsewhere.

The multi-version concurrency control and so on is pretty neat anyway. No transaction logs is a good thing. If I ever get time I might play with those ideas a little in Java - not because I necessarily think it's a great idea but just to see if it's possible. I played with an extensible hash thing for indexing in camel many years ago but it was plagued by durability problems.

Back to LMDB - i'll definitely give it a go for my revisioned database thing - at some point.