[davidhollander]

> and its permissive license

Other variables such as licensing are context dependent. In my context, I generally use embedded databases in shared library form to store arbitrary serialized Lua (much faster to reload than JSON, no need to compile protocol buffers) on my own servers, so in my development context LGPL vs BSD is irrelevant. But perhaps not for an iPhone developer. TokyoCabinet already has excellent bindings for nearly every language I've used, but thats irrelevant to a developer whose application is also C.

> Compare today's benchmarks with these http://fallabs.com/tokyocabinet/benchmark.pdf, it looks like random reads in LevelDB are quite faster than BDB.

I'd bet BDB is a snail, BUT the benchmark you just linked tests 0 databases in common with the one released by Google. What can be observed is that using a hashmap (TC) was over 7X faster than randomly accessing the fastest ordered data structure by the same author (TC-BT-RND) :)