Overview

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a simple LSM-Tree storage engine in the Go programming language.

The formal tutorial is published at https://zhenguozhang.github.io/mini-lsm/, and the starter code plus reference solution is available at https://github.com/zhenguozhang/mini-lsm. Welcome to take a look!

What is LSM, and Why LSM?

Log-structured merge tree is a data structure to maintain key-value pairs. This data structure is widely used in distributed database systems like TiDB and CockroachDB as their underlying storage engine. RocksDB, based on LevelDB, is an implementation of LSM-Tree storage engine. It provides a wide range of key-value access functionalities and is used in a lot of production systems.

Generally speaking, LSM Tree is an append-friendly data structure. It is more intuitive to compare LSM to other key-value data structure like RB-Tree and B-Tree. For RB-Tree and B-Tree, all data operations are in-place. That is to say, when you update the value corresponding to the key, the value will be overwritten at its original memory or disk space. But in an LSM Tree, all write operations, i.e., insertions, updates, deletions, are performed in somewhere else. These operations will be batched into SST (sorted string table) files and be written to the disk. Once written to the disk, the file will not be changed. These operations are applied lazily on disk with a special task called compaction. The compaction job will merge multiple SST files and remove unused data.

This architectural design makes LSM tree easy to work with.

  1. Data are immutable on persistent storage, which means that it is easier to offload the background tasks (compaction) to remote servers. It is also feasible to directly store and serve data from cloud-native storage systems like S3.
  2. An LSM tree can balance between read, write and space amplification by changing the compaction algorithm. The data structure itself is super versatile and can be optimized for different workloads.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to build an LSM-Tree-based storage engine in the Go programming language.

Prerequisites of the Tutorial

  • You should know the basics of the Go programming language. Reading Go programming language is enough.
  • You should know the basic concepts of key-value storage engines, i.e., why we need somehow complex design to achieve persistence. If you have no experience with database systems and storage systems before, you can implement Bitcask in PingCAP Talent Plan.
  • Knowing the basics of an LSM tree is not a requirement but we recommend you to read something about it, e.g., the overall idea of LevelDB. This would familiarize you with concepts like mutable and immutable mem-tables, SST, compaction, WAL, etc.

Overview of LSM

An LSM storage engine generally contains 3 parts:

  1. Write-ahead log to persist temporary data for recovery.
  2. SSTs on the disk for maintaining a tree structure.
  3. Mem-tables in memory for batching small writes.

The storage engine generally provides the following interfaces:

  • Put(key, value): store a key-value pair in the LSM tree.
  • Delete(key): remove a key and its corresponding value.
  • Get(key): get the value corresponding to a key.
  • Scan(range): get a range of key-value pairs.

To ensure persistence,

  • Sync(): ensure all the operations before sync are persisted to the disk.

Some engines choose to combine Put and Delete into a single operation called WriteBatch, which accepts a batch of key value pairs.

In this tutorial, we assume the LSM tree is using leveled compaction algorithm, which is commonly used in real-world systems.

Write Flow

Write Flow The write flow of LSM contains 4 steps:

  1. Write the key-value pair to write-ahead log, so that it can be recovered after the storage engine crashes.
  2. Write the key-value pair to memtable. After (1) and (2) completes, we can notify the user that the write operation is completed.
  3. When a memtable is full, we will flush it to the disk as an SST file in the background.
  4. We will compact some files in some level into lower levels to maintain a good shape for the LSM tree, so that read amplification is low.

Read Flow

Read Flow

When we want to read a key,

  1. We will first probe all the memtables from latest to oldest.
  2. If the key is not found, we will then search the entire LSM tree containing SSTs to find the data.

Tutorial Overview

Tutorial Overview

In this tutorial, we will build the LSM tree structure in 7 days:

  • Day 1: Block encoding. SSTs are composed of multiple data blocks. We will implement the block encoding.
  • Day 2: SST encoding.
  • Day 3: MemTable and Merge Iterators.
  • Day 4: Block cache and Engine. To reduce disk I/O and maximize performance, we will use moka-rs to build a block cache for the LSM tree. In this day we will get a functional (but not persistent) key-value engine with get, put, scan, delete API.
  • Day 5: Compaction. Now it's time to maintain a leveled structure for SSTs.
  • Day 6: Recovery. We will implement WAL and manifest so that the engine can recover after restart.
  • Day 7: Bloom filter and key compression. They are widely-used optimizations in LSM tree structures.