BDB: The Conclusion

2007-12-19

We gave up on using Berkeley DB for our metric store. There were just too few advantages over a higher-level solution like MySQL. BDB doesn’t have:

• A notion of schema or data types
• A query language
• Slick integration into Ruby

In the end it would have taken a LOT of manpower to wrap and tune BDB to work more efficiently than MySQL and we would have had a very complex proprietary system to maintain. MySQL simply provides a more standard system which more people understand.

It’s definitely a winner for embedded solutions with simple schema requirements but the implementation complexity grows as O(n^2) with the size of the schema in my estimation.