According to more restrictive libdb licence policy exists effort to remove libdb's dependencies. rpm is now built with libdb requirement, but in near future rpm should support other backend then libdb. Even it looks like it will be able to access BerkeleyDB databses without libdb dependency. https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/980
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 32 development cycle. Changing version to 32.
We wont be able to do this on Fedora 33 (much less 32), but Fedora 34 should be a realistic timeframe for cutting this cord finally. That'll be quite a moment.
Let's flick the switch in rawhide once Fedora 34 has been branched, it's a bit too close to comfort to do this for F34 at this point. Rpm >= 4.17 which is expected in Fedora 35 in a couple of months will drop support for libdb entirely so this will give people a bit of time to work things out if something unexpected breaks.
Due to popular request, change of plans: Turns out, this was actually planned and approved for F34 in the F33 sqlite change: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Sqlite_Rpmdb, and since we don't have a concrete reason not to (this is afterall trivial to revert if things go boom): BDB support disabled in rpm-4.16.1.2-6.fc34 Bye bye BDB, I'm not going to miss you.