OpenLDAP uses LMDB now, one of the fastest and reliable key/value stores around, which they wrote precisely because berkeleydb sucked.

Also because Oracle was kind of a dick (as usual) with the license after BDB 6.0.12.

A lot of projects have switch away from BDB for that reason, others still rely on BDB 5.3.

Also, I kind of agree that BDB is a bit of a nightmare to work with.

On this topic - we tried, really really tried, not to write our own database. We've used BerkeleyDB in OpenLDAP since around 2000. We'd sunk a ton of energy into learning how to use it optimally. And it was ~2 years, from when we started looking for better approaches in 2009, until we finally bit the bullet and started writing LMDB in 2011. Frankly I think "never roll your own" is good advice in 98% of cases, but if after you've examined all your options, you don't find what you're looking for, then there's no other choice.

This was early 2016 from the centos 7 repos, so this must be relatively recent. It didn't even have to be writing to it. I just had to reboot and it was left in a dirty state.

CentOS repos often don't use current software, so not necessarily.