Database Internals Notes#

Working notes on storage engines, distributed consensus, and the odd bit of network plumbing. Written mostly for me — when I read a paper or dig through a codebase, this is where I keep the notes so I can find them again.

Recent#

• Compaction back-pressure — 2024-11-14
• LSM write amplification revisited — 2024-11-03
• A few notes on BBR queueing under bufferbloat — 2024-09-18
• Joint consensus vs single-server changes in Raft — 2024-07-22
• Why I keep coming back to Paxos — 2024-05-04
• RocksDB tuning for tiny writes — 2024-02-14

Sections#

• Storage Engines — LSM, B-Tree, buffer pool, WAL, compaction.
• Consensus — Paxos, Raft, membership changes, leader leases.
• Distributed Systems — FoundationDB, CockroachDB, range management, gossip.
• Networking — BBR, HOL blocking, TCP tuning.

About#

Reading list is roughly: Database Internals (Petrov), Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann), the CMU 15-445/15-721 lecture notes, and whatever paper caught my eye that week. See About for the setup and the tools used to generate this site.

No comments, no analytics. If a note is wrong, it's wrong — I'll get to it eventually.