Fedora wants to migrate RPM database from Berkeley DB to SQLite

The Red Hat developers responsible for Fedora plan to transition the RPM database (RPMDB) from Berkeley DB, which has been used previously, to SQLite.

Since Oracle acquired Sleepycat Software, the developer of Berkeley DB in 2006, Berkeley DB 6.0 and later has adopted a dual license consisting of an AGPL open source agreement and a commercial license, rather than the previously free software license agreement. The change to the dual license made RPMDB decide not to use Berkeley DB anymore, even though the latest upstream version of Berkeley DB has been updated to 18.1.

Some people think that the old Berkeley DB 5 should be abandoned, but for Fedora 33, this goal may need to be achieved later this year, and it provides Fedora 32 with a year to fully transition.

Developers believe that once the modern features of SQLite are fully implemented and utilized, it will bring a more powerful RPM database and get rid of the dependency on Berkeley DB, one of the core components.

Get more details about the RPMDB SQLite transition plan on this wiki page. For Fedora 33 as well, the plan will use RPM 4.16. RPM 4.16 is the original experimental SQLite backend with an improved expression parser, SSD detection and optimization, and other features.