Sleepycat Software, makers of the world's most widely deployed open source developer databases, announced that Berkeley DB XML is used by MapServer Enterprise, a new software platform that lets developers build and manage web-based geospatial applications. Berkeley DB XML serves as the common repository for storing connections to geospatial data and the rules for presenting the data, allowing MapServer Enterprise users to easily create interactive maps and define the appearance of map features such as roads, freeways and city borders. Autodesk recently announced that it is releasing the MapServer Enterprise code as open source to the new MapServer Foundation an independent non-profit organization with the mission of supporting and promoting open source web-based mapping tools. The company also plans to offer a commercial version of the product called Autodesk MapServer Enterprise in 2006, and an authoring environment which handles geospatial data collection and preparation of the data for distribution via the Internet.

Berkeley DB XML enables MapServer Enterprise to rapidly access a diverse collection of separate XML documents that are linked together to define a map. MapServer Enterprise uses the content of these documents to establish connections to geospatial data sources such as Oracle Spatial, query geospatial data, render the data using the cartographic rules stored in the XML documents, and then assemble multiple layers of cartographic output into a map to produce either an Autodesk DWF stream or raster image. MapServer Enterprise uses XQuery in conjunction with Berkeley DB XML indexing to find the XML documents necessary to produce complete map images in under a second.

"Autodesk chose Berkeley DB XML for MapServer Enterprise so that our customers can easily and quickly customize maps to meet their specific requirements," said Gary Lang, vice president of engineering, Infrastructure Solutions Division of Autodesk. "Berkeley DB XML gives us great flexibility and performance with zero administration."

"We're pleased that Autodesk has selected Berkeley DB XML for MapServer Enterprise," said Mike Olson, CEO of Sleepycat Software. "Berkeley DB XML is a high-performance XML layer built on the Berkeley DB storage engine, which has been proven in hundreds of millions of deployments worldwide. Autodesk customers can be confident that their XML data will be there when they need it."

Berkeley DB XML is a high performance, native XML database with XQuery-based access to documents stored in containers and indexed based on their content. Berkeley DB XML is a library, not a server, exposes a programmatic API for developers, and runs in process with the application with no need for administration. Thanks to Berkeley DB as the underlying storage engine, Berkeley DB XML inherits full ACID transactions, automatic recovery, hot standby, XA for distributed transactions, on-disk data encryption with AES, and replication for high availability. In addition, both XML and non-XML data can be stored in Berkeley DB XML.