SleepyCat Software has launched Berkeley DB 4.4 the latest upgrade of its free-to-cheap database software. V4.4 has a long list of new features and efficiency enhancements, published on this press release.

The company claims 200 million deployments of Berkeley DB, a “massive user base”, which as Mike Olsen, Sleepycat Software’s CEO, modestly notes, “continues to help us advance the state of the art in database technology. Our latest release of Berkeley DB includes new features based on customer requests and delivers significant improvements in performance and flexibility for developers."

SleepyCat offers Berkeley DB 4.4 through a commercial licence, if it is redistributed in proprietary applications. And there is also a FOC open source license option with allows redistribution if the application using Berkeley DB is open source.

Download Berkeley DB at: http://www.sleepycat.com/products/bdb.html

To accompany the launch SleepyCat has wheeled out its biggest OEM customers, Sun Microsystems and MySQL, for the obligatory canned quotes. And very nice they are too.

Says William Franklin, senior director, Database Technology at Sun Microsystems: "Sun Microsystems uses Berkeley DB within several products in our software portfolio such as the Sun Java System Portal Server, Identity Manager and Directory Server. Berkeley DB 4.4 adds a number of important enhancements that we will be able to leverage. We value Sleepycat products' consistently high performance, reliability and scalability."

And now to Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, who says: "Berkeley DB has for many years been one of the options available within MySQL's pluggable storage engine architecture. Developers can choose the storage engine whose features and performance best meets the needs of the application. Berkeley DB is very fast and supports ACID transactions, and we continue to collaborate with Sleepycat to ensure our products are well integrated." ®