I'm not aware of any repeatable database corruption related to
Subversion and Berkeley DB, ever. We've seen reports of corrupted
databases in the past, but those were isolated events, caused either by
hardware failure or configuration errors (such as placing BDB database
environments on NFS volumes).
The issue that did come up fairly often is the situation where the
Berkeley DB database would become inaccessible because the Subversion
server exited holding BDB handles/mutexes due to an unexpected system
or application failure. This situation required manual intervention
(running database recovery) by the server administrator.
The Berkeley DB 4.X release includes additional functionality intended
to simplify BDB usage in multi-process applications like Subversion.
In addition, Sleepycat Software funded Subversion developers to modify
Subversion to take advantage of that new functionality. The BDB 4.X
releases are already public, and I expect the Subversion changes to be
part of the svn-1.3.1 release.
With the release of a reasonable integration between Subversion and
Berkeley DB, I believe the reports of Subversion problems with BDB will
finally be resolved.
To be clear, the problem was never with Berkeley DB or, for that
matter, with Subversion -- the problem was they were incorrectly
integrated.
Regards,
--keith
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Keith Bostic bostic@sleepycat.com
Sleepycat Software Inc. keithbosticim (Yahoo IM)
118 Tower Rd. +1-781-259-3139
Lincoln, MA 01773 http://www.sleepycat.com
