libdb is a community continuation of Berkeley DB, maintained by a former member of Sleepycat Software and Oracle's Berkeley DB team. It keeps Berkeley DB what it has always been — a small, fast, embedded library (no server, no daemon) that links directly into your process — while modernizing the build, the tests, and the code.
What it is: ACID transactions write-ahead log + crash recovery B-tree · Hash · Queue · Recno concurrent multi-process C / C++ / SQL tiny footprint
Get it
Latest release: v2026.09.4 (notes).
git clone https://github.com/berkeleydb/libdb.git
cd libdb/build_unix
../dist/configure && makeAlso builds with Meson/Ninja (meson setup build && ninja -C build)
and ships a Nix flake (nix build github:berkeleydb/libdb).
Releases
| Version | Notes |
|---|---|
| v2026.09.4 | #137 locker accounting (bounded), ssi_abort_bench SI/SSI distinction, versioning covenant |
| v2026.09.3 | DB_TXN_SNAPSHOT restored to plain SI + new DB_TXN_SERIALIZABLE; os_aio durability fix; #138 MVCC-retention purge |
| v2026.09.2 | Cursor-queue sharding (concurrent read scaling); two-site replication-isolation harness |
| v2026.09.1 | Queue cursor read-path DoS bound |
| v2026.09 | Correctness: SSI commit-window write skew (#136), IV entropy from OS CSPRNG, heap OOB write (#140) |
| v2026.08 | Serializable snapshot isolation available by default |
| v2026.07.3 | Testing depth: DST fault-class parity + formal verification (CBMC), PBT hardening |
| v2026.07.2 | Coverage & correctness: full-suite coverage to the mid-70s, several bug fixes |
| v2026.07.1 | Testing & hardening: fuzzing, malloc-injection, 10 bug fixes |
| v2026.07 | SSI hardening, build hygiene |
| v2026.04 | First community fork release |
| v5.3.28 | Berkeley DB 11gR2 (11.2.5.3.28) — the last Oracle open-source release |
| v4.6.21-SSI | Cahill SSI prototype (SIGMOD 2008), historical |
All releases → · Oracle's original tarballs mirror at osuosl.org · FreeBSD keeps a full source+patch archive.
Documentation
The Berkeley DB Reference is the
modernized, single-sourced manual for the current release — the C and
C++/STL API reference, the Programmer's Reference, the Getting Started
guides (data storage, transactions, replication), installation, upgrading,
porting, and Berkeley DB SQL. Generated from Markdown, it is also available
as PDF and
man pages
(man libdb, man db_get, …).
- C API Reference · C++ / STL API
- Programmer's Reference
- Getting Started: Data Storage · Transactions · Replication
- Installation & Build · Upgrading · Berkeley DB SQL
The manuals track the current 2026.09.4 release; the on-disk, log, and API formats are stable (the format/ABI compatibility level is frozen at 5.3.37 — see the versioning covenant in the README).
Historical archive
The original Oracle DocBook manuals are kept for reference: Berkeley DB 5.3.28 · 5.3.21 (11gR2) · Berkeley DB XML 2.5.16. The C#/Java language-binding docs are archived separately.
Project status
Actively maintained. The single-node transactional core is production-grade and, by the fork's own measure, better-tested than the last Oracle release: unit tests, deterministic simulation testing (crash / torn-write / corruption / disk-full / clock-skew / crash-during-recovery / multi-process failchk / buggify), property-based tests, fuzzing, malloc-fault injection, static analysis + ABI checks, and CBMC formal verification — all run in CI across Linux, macOS, 32-bit, and multiple compilers and mutex backends.
License: the historical Sleepycat license for the original code; see the repository for details on newer contributions.