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compatibilityberkeley-db
fluter
fluter

Reputation: 13796

Berkeley Db 4 and later versions compatibility

For Berkeley db, some distro like fedora have both libdb4 and libdb(version 5), so why is this, is version 4 not compatible with future versions? Does my application need to support both versions?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 635

Answers (1)

Mike Andrews
Mike Andrews

Reputation: 3206

There was a log file format change between version 4 and 5 that requires an upgrade. Essentially, yes, version 4 databases are not strictly compatible with the version 5 runtime. The on-disk data must be upgraded. Not all applications are ready to handle this, so libdb4 is still floating around.

You can find the changelog on Oracle's BDB site, here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/downloads/index-082944.html

BDB version 6 has been out for about four years now. That's not much time in the life of a 20+ year old database. So, if you're finding that version 5 is still the widely distributed version (it probably is), then you should write your application to that. It has numerous bugfixes. If you want maximum compatibility with (much) older distros, write your application to version 4.

Upvotes: 3

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