Oracle has released Oracle Bereley DB Java Edition 4.0 including new features for high availability, scalability and performance. It is an open source, transactional storage engine for key-value pairs written entirely in java that can be deployed as an embedded database, enabling developers to build applications that require no manual administration.

The company claims that the new edition includes new replication features for high availability and scalability and performance improvements for highly concurrent applications. Reportedly, improved monitoring capabilities, including a plug-in for the java jconsole utility, make it easier to deploy and monitor applications that utilise Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition.

Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 joins recently released Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8 and Oracle Berkeley DB XML 2.5. All three products are designed for developers, ISVs, OEMs and enterprises to integrate directly into their software applications, devices and equipment.

According to Oracle, Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition provides java data persistence library that helps reduce the overhead of object persistence. Release 4.0 supports automatic system fail over and load balancing of read operations, allowing developers to eliminate single points of failure and decrease downtime.

It also provides a single master, multiple replica replication implementation including features such as dynamic group membership, configurable transaction durability and consistency guarantees, automatic fail-over and both synchronous and asynchronous replication. It also includes in-depth documentation, examples and java helper classes to make it easy to use and configure, the company said.

In addition, several new features provide enhancements to the existing APIs, and the exception handling system has been restructured to make errors easier to catch, handle and recover from, without requiring changes to existing applications, the company said.

Rex Wang, vice president of product marketing at Oracle, said: The combination of high availability, high scalability and high performance in a pure Java, embeddable package makes Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition highly differentiated from other alternatives.