Reviewing LevelDBPart XVII– Filters? What filters? Oh, those filters…
time to read 2 min | 243 words

I was all set to finish this series, when I realized that I missed something important, I didn’t covered, and indeed, I don’t currently understand, what filters are, and how are they used.

As usual, once I actually got to the part of the code where this is actually handled (instead of ignoring it), it made a lot more sense:

image

And that, following with the rest of the code that I read makes a lot more sense.

A SST is a sorted table, essentially. We have the keys and the blocks, etc. And we can find a value very quickly. But what if you could do this even more cheaply?

Using a bloom filter is a good way to never get false negative, and it will reduce the amount of work we have to do if we can’t find the key in the SST drastically (only need to read the filter value, don’t even need to do any additional checks). Quite elegant, even if I say so myself.

There is one thing to pay attention to and that is that you can define your own comparator, in which case you must also define you own filter policy. If you use a comparator that ignore casing, you also need to provider a filter that ignore casing.

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More posts in "Reviewing LevelDB" series:

  1. (26 Apr 2013) Part XVIII–Summary
  2. (15 Apr 2013) Part XVII– Filters? What filters? Oh, those filters…
  3. (12 Apr 2013) Part XV–MemTables gets compacted too
  4. (11 Apr 2013) Part XVI–Recovery ain’t so tough?
  5. (10 Apr 2013) Part XIV– there is the mem table and then there is the immutable memtable
  6. (09 Apr 2013) Part XIII–Smile, and here is your snapshot
  7. (08 Apr 2013) Part XII–Reading an SST
  8. (05 Apr 2013) Part XI–Reading from Sort String Tables via the TableCache
  9. (04 Apr 2013) Part X–table building is all fun and games until…
  10. (03 Apr 2013) Part IX- Compaction is the new black
  11. (02 Apr 2013) Part VIII–What are the levels all about?
  12. (29 Mar 2013) Part VII–The version is where the levels are
  13. (28 Mar 2013) Part VI, the Log is base for Atomicity
  14. (27 Mar 2013) Part V, into the MemTables we go
  15. (26 Mar 2013) Part IV
  16. (22 Mar 2013) Part III, WriteBatch isn’t what you think it is
  17. (21 Mar 2013) Part II, Put some data on the disk, dude
  18. (20 Mar 2013) Part I, What is this all about?