alt Hacker NewsBerkeley DB is one of those things everyone respected, for some reason, but that didn't actually work if you threw a bit of data at it. And not just for us. I remember talking to companies that paid them lots of money to work on reliability, and it never got better.
But I do remember reading much of the source (trying to figure out why it didn't work) and thinking "this is pretty nice code".
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mistrial9 • yesterday at 3:52 PM
yeah - scars still visible here from a year 2000 project using BerkeleyDB. Unbelievable complexity to write adapters to ordinary desktop software.
Well, it worked for Amazon — Berkeley DB was used extensively there as the makn database, right from the beginning. I remember talking to an ex-Amazon engineer in 2006 who said BDB was still the main database used for inventory, and complained that everything was a mess, with different teams using different tech for everything. Around that time Amazon made DynamoDB to solve some of that mess — and it sat on top of BDB.
An old thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29290095.