Oracle has released Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 including new features for high availability, scalability and performance. The Oracle press release also says that this demonstrates Oracle’s continuing commitment to open source, Java and the developer community.

A member of the Oracle Berkeley DB product family, Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition is an open source, transactional storage engine for key-value pairs written entirely in Java that can be deployed as an embedded or “edge” database, enabling developers to build applications that require no manual administration. Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 includes new replication features for high availability and scalability and significant performance improvements for highly concurrent applications. Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 with high availability is available under the existing Oracle dual license for Berkeley DB Java Edition.

Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition provides a pure Java data persistence library that claims to dramatically reduce the overhead of object persistence while keeping the flexibility, speed and scalability of object to relational mapping (ORM) solutions.

“Oracle continues to innovate and enhance the open source Berkeley DB product line. Adding a replication capability in Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 greatly enhances the product’s value proposition, since this kind of feature is used for applications requiring fault tolerance and scalability beyond a single node,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President at IDC.

Highlights of release 4.0 as stated by Oracle include:

High Availability/Replication : Supports automatic system fail over and load balancing of read operations, allowing developers to eliminate single points of failure and decrease downtime. The new capabilities also deliver improved write performance and scalability across multiple systems. High Availability/Replication provides a single master, multiple replica replication implementation including features such as dynamic group membership, configurable transaction durability and consistency guarantees, automatic fail-over and both synchronous and asynchronous replication. The High Availability/Replication feature also includes in-depth documentation, examples and Java helper classes to make it easy to use and configure.

: Supports automatic system fail over and load balancing of read operations, allowing developers to eliminate single points of failure and decrease downtime. The new capabilities also deliver improved write performance and scalability across multiple systems. Performance Improvements : Enables performance improvements to the existing concurrent execution and group commit functionality, especially important for multi-threaded applications that are committing many transactions concurrently or have high write-intensive operations within specific data sets or “hot spots” in the database.

: Enables performance improvements to the existing concurrent execution and group commit functionality, especially important for multi-threaded applications that are committing many transactions concurrently or have high write-intensive operations within specific data sets or “hot spots” in the database. Ease of Use : New monitoring features make it easier to deploy and monitor the Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition data store in production applications, while API and exception handling improvements make it easier to develop applications. Improved monitoring capabilities allow users to better understand the internal state and statistics of the Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition database for performance tuning and trouble-shooting. This release supports the industry-standard Java jconsole utility out-of-the-box, which can be used to view and graph database statistics and easily integrate Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition monitoring with third party monitoring tools. Additionally, several new features provide enhancements to the existing APIs, and the exception handling system has been restructured to make errors easier to catch, handle and recover from, without requiring changes to existing applications.

: New monitoring features make it easier to deploy and monitor the Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition data store in production applications, while API and exception handling improvements make it easier to develop applications.