Elephant is an object database for Common Lisp. It supports storing CLOS objects and most lisp primitives, and access to BTrees. It uses Sleepycat / Berkeley DB, a widely-distributed embedded database; many unix systems have it installed by default. Sleepycat is server-less, ACID compliant, transactional, process and thread safe, and fast relative to relational databases; hopefully Elephant inherits these properties.
This release, Elephant 0.3, also provieds support for relational backends. It has been tested with Postgres and SQLite 3. It is back-compatible with any code that ran against previous versions of Elephant, but also supports simultaneous multi-repository operation and convenient migration of data between repositories. This hopefully allows decisions about the prefered back-end storage mechanism to be delayed and changed, even after an application that uses Elephant is mature.
Goals:
Join the Elephant mailing lists to ask your questions and receive updates. They're on the Elephant website at
http://www.common-lisp.net/project/elephant.
Installation documents can be found in the file INSTALL.