Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Additional References

Additional references

For more information on Berkeley DB, or on database systems theory in general, we recommend the sources listed below.

Technical Papers on Berkeley DB

These papers have appeared in refereed conference proceedings, and are subject to copyrights held by the conference organizers and the authors of the papers. Sleepycat Software makes them available here as a courtesy with the permission of the copyright holders.

Berkeley DB (HTML, Postscript)

Michael Olson, Keith Bostic, and Margo Seltzer, Proceedings of the 1999 Summer Usenix Technical Conference, Monterey, California, June 1999. This paper describes recent commercial releases of Berkeley DB, its most important features, the history of the software, and Sleepycat's Open Source licensing policies.

Challenges in Embedded Database System Administration (HTML)

Margo Seltzer and Michael Olson, First Workshop on Embedded Systems, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 1999. This paper describes the challenges that face embedded systems developers, and how Berkeley DB has been designed to address them.

LIBTP: Portable Modular Transactions for UNIX (Postscript)

Margo Seltzer and Michael Olson, USENIX Conference Proceedings, Winter 1992. This paper describes an early prototype of the transactional system for Berkeley DB.

A New Hashing Package for UNIX (Postscript)

Margo Seltzer and Oz Yigit, USENIX Conference Proceedings, Winter 1991. This paper describes the Extended Linear Hashing techniques used by Berkeley DB.

Background on Berkeley DB Features

These papers, while not specific to Berkeley DB, give a good overview of how different Berkeley DB features were implemented.

Operating System Support for Database Management

Michael Stonebraker, Communications of the ACM 24(7), 1981, pp. 412-418.

Dynamic Hash Tables

Per-Ake Larson, Communications of the ACM, April 1988.

Linear Hashing: A New Tool for File and Table Addressing

Witold Litwin, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 1980

The Ubiquitous B-tree

Douglas Comer, ACM Comput. Surv. 11, 2 (June 1979), pp. 121-138.

Prefix B-trees

Bayer and Unterauer, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol. 2, 1 (March 1977), pp. 11-26.

The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 3: Sorting and Searching

D.E. Knuth, 1968, pp. 471-480.

Document Processing in a Relational Database System

Michael Stonebraker, Heidi Stettner, Joseph Kalash, Antonin Guttman, Nadene Lynn, Memorandum No. UCB/ERL M82/32, May 1982.

Database Systems Theory

These publications are standard reference works on the design and implementation of database systems. Berkeley DB uses many of the ideas they describe.

Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques

by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. We recommend chapters 1, 4 (skip 4.6, 4.7, 4.9, 4.10 and 4.11), 7, 9, 10.3, and 10.4.

An Introduction to Database Systems, Volume 1

by C.J. Date, Addison Wesley Longman Publishers. In the 5th Edition, we recommend chapters 1, 2, 3, 16 and 17.

Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems

by Bernstein, Goodman, Hadzilaco. Currently out of print, but available from http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/ccontrol/.

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