I'm designing a Java based web-app and I need a key-value store. Berkeley DB seems fitting enough for me, but there appears to be TWO Berkeley DBs to choose from: Berkeley DB Core which is implemented in C, and Berkeley DB Java Edition which is implemented in pure Java.
The question is, how to choose which one to use? With web-apps scalability and performance is quite important (who knows, maybe my idea will become the next Youtube), and I couldn't find easily any meaningful benchmarks between the two. I have yet to familiarize with Cores Java API, but I find it hard to believe that it could be much worse than Java Editions, which seems to be quite nice.
If some other key-value store would be much better, feel free to recommend that too. I'm storing smallish binary blobs, and keys probably will be hashes of the data, or some other unique id.
If you derive a common interface to these, and have a suitable set of unit tests, you should be able to swap between the two trivially at a later date (perhaps when you really need to make a decision based on hard facts that are not available right now)