This is the golang implementation of Riak's bitcask paper. This project is for educational purposes only. The idea is to provide a reference implementation of bitcask to help anyone interested in storage engines understand the basics of building a persistent key-value storage engine.

I have written a detailed blog on bitcask.

• Support for put, get, update and delete operations
• Low latency for reads and writes
• Simple and easy to understand
• Configurable compaction
• Rich documentation

• The implementation does not support transactions
• The implementation does not support range queries
• The implementation does not support hint files
• RAM usage is high because all the keys are stored in an in-memory hashmap
• Too many open files handles at the OS end

Every write operation (put(key, value), update(key,value) and delete(key)) goes in an append-only data file. At any moment, one file is "active" for writing. When that file meets a size threshold, it will be closed for writing, and a new active file will be created. Once a file is closed for writing, it is considered immutable (or inactive) and will never be opened for writing again. However, it will still be used for reading.

All the entries in the data file follow a fixed structure:

This implementation of bitcask uses 32 bits for the timestamp, 32 bits for the key size and 32 bits for the value size. Once an entry is written to the append-only data file, the key, along with its file metadata, is stored in an in-memory hashmap. It stores the key and an Entry consisting of FileId, Offset and EntryLength as the value in the hashmap.

The get operation performs a lookup in the hashmap and gets an Entry.

If the Entry corresponding to the key is found, a read operation is performed in the file identified by the fileId. This read operation involves performing a Seek to the offset in the file and then reading the entire entry ([]byte) identified by the entry length. After the entry is read, it is decoded to get the value.

Every update and delete operation is also an append operation to a data file. This model may use up a lot of space over time, since we just write out new values without touching the old ones. A compaction process referred to as "merging" solves this. The merge process iterates over all non-active (i.e. immutable) files and produces as output a set of data files containing only the latest values of each present key.

The implementation has code comments to help readers understand the reasons behind various decisions and explain the working of the bitcask model.

Sample comment:

bitcask