How RocksDB works
Introduction #
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.
Today RocksDB runs in production at Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber. At Meta RocksDB serves as a storage engine for the MySQL deployment powering the distributed graph database.
Big tech companies are not the only RocksDB users. Several startups were built around RocksDB - CockroachDB, Yugabyte, PingCAP, Rockset.
I spent the past 4 years at Datadog building and running services on top of RocksDB in production. In this post, I'll give a high-level overview of how RocksDB works.