Berkeley DB in Subversion

Hi,

I'm Mike Olson. I work at Sleepycat Software. We develop,
distribute, and support Berkeley DB.

I came across this excerpt on your Web site, and wanted to
follow up with you about it:

     SQL Back-End

     The Subversion filesystem will probably use Berkeley DB to store
     data on disk; however, a real SQL database provides much more
     reliable transactions. Someone can rewrite the filesystem back-end
     to speak SQL.

Needless to say, we disagree pretty strongly about the reliable
transactions statement. Berkeley DB survives failure without loss
of data, and without corruption. We're a bunch of database
heavyweights with significant time at the big relational companies.
We use the same techniques that the other vendors do for transactions,
including two-phase locking and write-ahead logging. I don't think
that a relational client/server system would be more reliable, but
I'm certain that it would be slower.

Have you had problems with Berkeley DB that led you to make that
statement? If there's a problem, we'd like to know more so that
we can help you fix it.

If you're in deployment now with Berkeley DB in Milestone 1, we'd
like to include you on our open source partners page. We've
recently redesigned the Web site, and will put up a new page in
the next few weeks that lists the open source projects that rely
on Berkeley DB. We'd be glad to have Subversion on that list,
if you're willing.

Please do let me know about the reliability issue.

                                        mike
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:23 2006