But when I discovered Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant I almost literally fell in love. We used it for things that would have been impossible without it at the time.
Still worth checking it out: https://github.com/hthetiot/Tokyo-Cabinet
But I do remember reading much of the source (trying to figure out why it didn't work) and thinking "this is pretty nice code".
An old thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29290095.
They phased out BDB before DynamoDB was launched. Some time between 2007 and 2010. By the time DynamoDB launched as a product in 2012(?), BDB was gone.
Berkeley DBs were the go-to online databases for a long time at Amazon, at least until I left at the turn of the century. We had Oracle databases too, but they weren't used in production, they were just another source of truth for the BDBs.
There's no shortage of embeddable key-value stores with C bindings like leveldb, rocksdb, or even gdbm, and all of them have worked better for me.
https://github.com/mechanicker/cramp
Later in ~2011, used BDB for indexing filesystem metadata at a large storage vendor for enhancing data management in a storage cluster.
Clean API with language bindings makes it easy to integrate with different languages.