Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
| From: | Noah Veltman <noah-AT-pageonepr.com> | |
| To: | lwn-AT-lwn.net | |
| Subject: | Open Source Collaboration | |
| Date: | Tue, 7 Feb 2006 12:27:54 -0800 |
--News Release-- SLEEPYCAT HARDENS SUBVERSION VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM WITH HIGHLY RELIABLE DATABASE Berkeley DB ensures Subversion data integrity and provides automatic recovery in the event of system failure Emeryville and Brisbane, Calif. February 7, 2006 Sleepycat Software, makers of the Berkeley DB family of open source developer databases, and CollabNet, the leading provider of on-demand distributed software development solutions and primary sponsor of the Subversion open source project, today announced that the two companies have collaborated, along with the Subversion open source community, to optimize the integration between Berkeley DB and Subversion, ensuring that data is stored reliably and with full, automatic recoverability after a system or application failure. Subversion is the preeminent open source version control system for managing source code, documentation, and other files. The latest version of Berkeley DB v4.4 is being integrated into the upcoming Subversion 1.3.1 as a repository for files and their previous versions. Berkeley DB provides Subversion with a number of features, among them guaranteed data integrity, automatic recovery, and hot or cold backups. Subversion has been using Sleepycat Berkeley DB since its inception, both for Berkeley DBs reliability and its features, said Karl Fogel, a founding developer of Subversion. Sleepycat has been an important contributor to Subversion by first enhancing Berkeley DB and then working with CollabNet and the broader Subversion open source community to update Subversion to take advantage of those added features. We have consistently received outstanding support from the Sleepycat engineers, and feel this close collaboration has helped make Subversion one of the most popular configuration management solutions today. Sleepycat is as committed to the open source community as to our commercial customers, both of whom use Berkeley DB in mission- critical applications, said Keith Bostic, co-founder and vice president of product development at Sleepycat Software. Subversion is a critical tool for developers, and as developers ourselves, we can appreciate the importance of a bullet-proof repository for source code. Berkeley DB is already used by hundreds of major open source projects, including all components of the LAMP stack, which consists of the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, and the scripting languages, Perl, Python, and PHP. Other open source projects using Berkeley DB include BSD UNIX, OpenLDAP, Kerberos, JBossCache, Sendmail, OpenOffice, and many others. Additional information on the use of Berkeley DB in open source projects is available at: http://www.sleepycat.com/customers/ opensource.html. Information on the use of Berkeley DB in commercial projects is available at: http://www.sleepycat.com/customers/ customerlist.html Availability The optimized Subversion and Berkeley DB integration is available in the Subversion development tree and is undergoing testing now. It is expected to be generally available as part of the upcoming Subversion 1.3.1 release. More information is available at: http:// subversion.tigris.org/ About CollabNet CollabNet develops and delivers innovative on-demand distributed software development solutions and is the primary sponsor of the award-winning Subversion open source project. Founded upon open source principles, CollabNet enables organizations to take advantage of global resources by delivering a web-based development platform as a managed service. CollabNet Enterprise Edition and CollabNet Subversion help companies eliminate the inefficiencies and limitations inherent in traditional development platforms by enabling on-demand development for geographically dispersed software development teams. The company is transforming traditional software development processes by allowing businesses to more efficiently and cost-effectively drive software projects through the application lifecycle, and collaborate securely with key business partners, contractors and offshore development firms across multiple locations. Using CollabNet solutions and services, organizations can realize the true value of their software assets to create reusable applications and re-architect for SOA deployment, ensure regulatory compliance, and create dynamic global development environments that deliver software projects on-time, on- target, and on-budget. More than 700,000 developers and IT project managers at global 2000 and industry-leading enterprise companies use CollabNet solutions. For more information: http://www.collab.net/. About Sleepycat Software Sleepycat Software (www.sleepycat.com) makes Berkeley DB, the most widely used open source developer database in the world with over 200 million deployments. Customers such as Amazon.com, AOL, Cisco Systems, EMC, Google, Hitachi, HP, Motorola, RSA Security, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO and VERITAS also rely on Berkeley DB for fast, scalable, reliable and cost-effective data management for their mission-critical applications. Profitable since it was founded in 1996, Sleepycat is a privately held company with offices in California, Massachusetts and the United Kingdom. Sleepycat Software and Berkeley DB are trademarks of Sleepycat Software, Inc. CollabNet is a trademark or registered trademark of CollabNet, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective holders. For more information, please contact: Tim Cloonan Director of Marketing CollabNet 650-228-2584 tim@collab.net Matt Otepka 104° West Partners PR for CollabNet 206-568-5142 matt.otepka@104degreeswest.com Craig Oda Sleepycat Software 650-565-9800 x102 coda@sleepycat.com
Posted Feb 8, 2006 0:40 UTC (Wed)
by joey (guest, #328)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 8, 2006 7:42 UTC (Wed)
by JoeF (guest, #4486)
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Posted Feb 8, 2006 1:23 UTC (Wed)
by ismail (subscriber, #11404)
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Posted Feb 8, 2006 1:38 UTC (Wed)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
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It's the database format that keeps breaking.
Posted Feb 8, 2006 13:54 UTC (Wed)
by ismail (subscriber, #11404)
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Posted Feb 11, 2006 4:09 UTC (Sat)
by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)
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Posted Feb 8, 2006 2:48 UTC (Wed)
by jwb (guest, #15467)
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Posted Feb 8, 2006 6:27 UTC (Wed)
by ctg (guest, #3459)
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Posted Feb 8, 2006 6:42 UTC (Wed)
by Dom2 (guest, #458)
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But I still love subversion. :-)
-Dom
Posted Feb 9, 2006 5:08 UTC (Thu)
by Peter (guest, #1127)
[Link] (1 responses)
While I appreciate the cynicism, they really do mean automatically.
This code was tested by doing normal subversion stuff but also having a
thread running whose only purpose was to start a transaction then get kill
-9'd. Once per second, or was it 10 times per second? Anyway, the ability
for an application to avoid wedging the DB even when dying unexpectedly is
new to DB 4.4, so your previous experiences aren't completely valid. DB isn't the default backend. Most people recommend the FSFS backend
instead, which is why it's the default. It's a little slower for some
operations, and creates a huge directory (one file per revision, just like
arch, so if you have 25000 revisions you get a dir with 25000 files, which
doesn't perform well with certain filesystems), but it has the very nice
property of not changing your old data - think of it as an append-only
system. And it works over NFS, not that we'd necessarily recommend it.
Posted Feb 9, 2006 8:51 UTC (Thu)
by georgm (subscriber, #19574)
[Link]
Posted Feb 9, 2006 4:58 UTC (Thu)
by Peter (guest, #1127)
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That's what this news release is about! Using new features of BDB 4.4,
it's now possible for the app to do this. Previously it was not. The
Subversion BDB backend was recently hacked on for awhile (the
By the way, I believe there's an error in the press release. They say
the new stuff will be in Subversion 1.3.1, but last I heard, that's not the
plan.
Sounds like good news for the three people who haven't switched their repos to fsfs yet..Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Yup. Too late. I switched my svn repositories to fsfs several months ago.Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Sleepycat could use a stable api, or let me put it this way: don't f*cking break Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
api every minor release!
Do they break API? I've been under the impression that the API is pretty darn stable. Even the ABI is stable, as I understand.Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Yeah you got me ;)Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
It's more like every minor release has an *entirely new* ABI, complete with C preprocessor tricks to add the current version number to every symbol in the library. On a good day this means you can link multiple versions dynamically into your executable. On a bad day this means you absolutely cannot link against some random shared library version, only the specific version your application was compiled with.Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Wait, how the HECK do you get automatic recovery from BDB? I have a single-reader multiple-writer database system, and any time any process is killed (be it reader or writer) the whole system wedges until an administrator can issue db_recover. I'd LOVE to know how to get this automatic recovery.Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Yeah, I can only think it means "automatic" in the sense of "whenever Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
anything goes wrong, the system administrator will automatically go
through a full recovery process because he/she knows there isn't any
point in trying to troubleshoot the system".
db4 is the most unreliable DB system I've ever come across - not that it
has failures, but that the smallest problem seems to cause the most major
impact. Impossible to work what is going wrong - everything hangs -
sometimes shutting the system down and doing a db_recover doesn't always
work - and a full dump and restore is required. I've switched to sqlite3
- which is a bit slower but seems to work - working/slow is better than
fast/broken.
The annoying part of this announcement is that we are in the process of
switching from CVS to SVN. I'll have to find out what this means w.r.t.
the impact on reliability.
To be honest, I'd still choose the FSFS over the DB4 backend. The main advantage is that because Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
it's bundled with subversion, something else upgrading your DB4 libraries won't suddenly stop your
version control system from working. Unfortunately, this did happen to me. I switched to FSFS
when subversion 1.1 came out and I haven't looked back...
Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Yeah, I can only think it means "automatic" in the sense of
"whenever anything goes wrong, the system administrator will automatically
go through a full recovery process
The annoying part of this announcement is that we are in the
process of switching from CVS to SVN. I'll have to find out what this
means w.r.t. the impact on reliability.
Ok, but what about file stability over releases?Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
I don't want to always get into trouble when switching to a newer db-Version. I had these problems for 2 or 3 times, then I switched to fsfs to avoid this problem.
Sleepycat and CollabNet Open Source Collaboration
Wait, how the HECK do you get automatic recovery from
BDB?
bdb-fixes branch) mainly to add this enhancement.bdb-fixes has been merged back to the development
trunk, but the developers are leaning toward not merging it into the
1.3.x branch until after 1.3.1 - so probably in 1.3.2 or so.
It's still new and needs a bit of time to "season" first.