Most people on this forum, believe that BerkeleyDB is free. Oracle has added some conditions that make it very expensive( our law firm's counsel ). One example: If a company employee downloads BerkeleyDB and installs it, that's okay. But as a software vendor, if I download it and install it, the company owes Oracle a fee based on number of cores and type of box. For a power7 IBM p-series with 32 cores, the license fee is $ 48,000. for the "free" BerkeleyDB.

Just in case anyone was wondering about it, see my take on it in Open Source License for Berkeley DB unchanged

The situation hasn't changed with the latest Berkeley db-5.3.21 , license is essentialy the same, though there is an addition of ASM for Java (only affects java bits, doesn't affect distribution / pricing )

But I'm not a businessman or a lawyer or work for oracle

regarding http://www.flexbasedb.com/, I notice you don't provide html only pdf, minor hassle

For anyone interested about PurePerlDB/FlexBaseDB, from http://www.flexbasedb.com/FlexBaseDB_Introduction.pdf

use strict;
use warnings;
use FlexBaseDB;
my $dirname = '/home/FlexBaseDB';
unlink glob("$dirname/*");
my $fbenv = FB_OpenENV ( EnvHome    =>  $dirname );
## Directory for database(s)
if ( ! $fbenv ) { die "FB_OpenENV: Bad ENV\n"; }
my $filename = "TestDB";
## Test file name in Environment!
my $fb = FB_OpenDB   (   FB_Name    =>  $filename,
## Unique name of database
                                            FB_ENV       =>  $fbenv,
## reference from FB_OpenENV
                                         );
if ( ! $fb ) { die "FB_OpenDB: Bad FILE\n"; }
my $key = "Hello"; my $data = "World, we're here!"; my $ret;
for my $count ( 1..5 )
{
$ret = FB_Write( $fb,\"$key-$count",\$data );
if ( $ret==FALSE ) { die "Write failed $FB_Error \n"; }
}
if ( FB_Seek( $fb,\$key, FB_FIRST ) )
{
print "\nOutput:\n\n";
while( $ret )
{
$key = ""; $data = "";
$ret = FB_ReadNext( $fb,\$key,\$data );
print "$key\t$data\n";
               }
}
print "\n","=" x 54, "\n";
## Will print statistics for your DB
my @results = FB_Stat ( $fb );
for my $no ( 0 .. $#results )
{
if ( substr($results[$no],0,1) eq "=" ) { $results[$no] = "=" x 54; }
print "$results[$no]\n";
}
print "=" x 54, "\n";
$ret = FB_CloseDB( $fb );
$ret = FB_CloseENV( $fbenv );
__END__
Output:
Hello-1 World, we're here!
Hello-2 World, we're here!
Hello-3 World, we're here!
Hello-4 World, we're here!
Hello-5 World, we're here!
[download]

Dear Monk,

I am not a lawyer, however if you do a web search on

"The Sneaky Sleepycat License"
[download]

you will find many legal opinions. Whether you are right or they are, I'm not the one to ask!

Most of our clients have IBM *ix systems, and we have to be concerned about the legal use or mis-use of our or other's software. This isn't just about my opinion!

YMMV!

"Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin

Many? I could only find a single one

The Sneaky Sleepycat License | Tech Law Garden

I tend to take the former licensors at their FAQ when they say The Berkeley DB license requires that Perl, and not your scripts, be freely redistributable

I don't know if you are familiar with the NoSQL database engine BerkeleyDB (now owned by Oracle), but I have written a pure perl replacement that performs as well. In some cases where the data portion of the key/value pair are very large, it outperforms BerkeleyDB.

I'm familiar with NoSQL and key-value stores such as Berkeley DB. But what I'd never heard of before reading your PerlMonks post is the idiom—the trick—of modifying data to disambiguate otherwise identical keys by appending control codes or invisible characters to them. This idiom seems "weirdo" to me, just as it did to Tom, who first invoked the word to describe it.

Is my example Perl script a fair representation of the idiom your NoSQL database software uses to disambiguate like keys?

I'm not a database theory guru or a database programming wizard, but my gut sense is that the idiom you describe of ornamenting data with invisible control codes or other characters is fraught with problems. I understand how data modified this way would ensure uniqueness and preserve insertion order. But how then do you match such modified strings? Isn't there a better way to achieve the same objectives without altering data? Do other NoSQL database engines besides yours use this same idiom? If so, which ones?

Jim