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Elephant is an Common Lisp OODB, as opposed to a language-neutral (e.g. language-unspecific) RDBMS. This means it can store most Lisp values without programmer intervention, special syntax or laborious conversion. In that way it is similar to prevalence, but it is actually a database: it is not in-memory (though it can be.)
When someone says "database," most people think of SQL RDBMSs (oracle, postgresql, mysql). Elephant uses Berekely DB (Sleepycat) which is much simpler: there is no special SQL relational syntax, just access to BTrees and other datatypes. It is a C library, not a server. On the other hand it is quite robust, and has many features, like transactions and replication. While you don't need to understand Sleepycat to use Elephant, reading the docs will certainly help you. They can be found at http://www.sleepycat.com.