Reviewing LevelDBPart XVIII–Summary

time to read 2 min | 349 words

Well, I am very happy at the conclusion of this blog post series. Beside being one of the longest that I have done, this actually stretched my ability to count using roman numerals.

In summary, I am quite happy that I spent the time reading all of this code. The LevelDB codebase is really simple, when you grok what it actually does. There is nothing there that would totally stun a person. What there is there, however, is a lot of accumulated experience in building those sort of things.

You see this all over the place, in the format of the SST, in the way compaction is working, in the ability to add filters, write merging, etc. The leveldb codebase is a really good codebase to read, and I am very happy to have done so. Especially since doing this in C++ is way out of m comfort zone. It was also interesting to read what I believe is idiomatic C++ code.

Another observation about leveldb is that it is a hard core C++ product. You can’t really take that and use the same approach in a managed environment. In particular, efforts to port leveldb to java (https://github.com/dain/leveldb/) are going to run into hard issues with problems like managing the memory. Java, like .NET, has issues with allocating large byte arrays, and even from the brief look I took, working with leveldb on java using the codebase as it is would likely put a lot of pressure there.

Initially, I wanted to use leveldb as a storage engine for RavenDB. Since I couldn’t get it compiling & working on Windows (and yes, that is a hard requirement. And yes, it has to be compiling on my machine to apply), I thought about just porting it. That isn’t going to be possible. At least not in the trivial sense. Too much work is require to make it work properly.

Yes, I have an idea, no, you don’t get to hear it at this time Smile.

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?