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authorPieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>2014-10-16 12:23:50 -0700
committerPieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>2014-10-16 12:23:50 -0700
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+**LevelDB is a fast key-value storage library written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values.**
+
+Authors: Sanjay Ghemawat (sanjay@google.com) and Jeff Dean (jeff@google.com)
+
+# Features
+ * Keys and values are arbitrary byte arrays.
+ * Data is stored sorted by key.
+ * Callers can provide a custom comparison function to override the sort order.
+ * The basic operations are `Put(key,value)`, `Get(key)`, `Delete(key)`.
+ * Multiple changes can be made in one atomic batch.
+ * Users can create a transient snapshot to get a consistent view of data.
+ * Forward and backward iteration is supported over the data.
+ * Data is automatically compressed using the [Snappy compression library](http://code.google.com/p/snappy).
+ * External activity (file system operations etc.) is relayed through a virtual interface so users can customize the operating system interactions.
+ * [Detailed documentation](http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/google/leveldb/blob/master/doc/index.html) about how to use the library is included with the source code.
+
+
+# Limitations
+ * This is not a SQL database. It does not have a relational data model, it does not support SQL queries, and it has no support for indexes.
+ * Only a single process (possibly multi-threaded) can access a particular database at a time.
+ * There is no client-server support builtin to the library. An application that needs such support will have to wrap their own server around the library.
+
+# Performance
+
+Here is a performance report (with explanations) from the run of the
+included db_bench program. The results are somewhat noisy, but should
+be enough to get a ballpark performance estimate.
+
+## Setup
+
+We use a database with a million entries. Each entry has a 16 byte
+key, and a 100 byte value. Values used by the benchmark compress to
+about half their original size.
+
+ LevelDB: version 1.1
+ Date: Sun May 1 12:11:26 2011
+ CPU: 4 x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
+ CPUCache: 4096 KB
+ Keys: 16 bytes each
+ Values: 100 bytes each (50 bytes after compression)
+ Entries: 1000000
+ Raw Size: 110.6 MB (estimated)
+ File Size: 62.9 MB (estimated)
+
+## Write performance
+
+The "fill" benchmarks create a brand new database, in either
+sequential, or random order. The "fillsync" benchmark flushes data
+from the operating system to the disk after every operation; the other
+write operations leave the data sitting in the operating system buffer
+cache for a while. The "overwrite" benchmark does random writes that
+update existing keys in the database.
+
+ fillseq : 1.765 micros/op; 62.7 MB/s
+ fillsync : 268.409 micros/op; 0.4 MB/s (10000 ops)
+ fillrandom : 2.460 micros/op; 45.0 MB/s
+ overwrite : 2.380 micros/op; 46.5 MB/s
+
+Each "op" above corresponds to a write of a single key/value pair.
+I.e., a random write benchmark goes at approximately 400,000 writes per second.
+
+Each "fillsync" operation costs much less (0.3 millisecond)
+than a disk seek (typically 10 milliseconds). We suspect that this is
+because the hard disk itself is buffering the update in its memory and
+responding before the data has been written to the platter. This may
+or may not be safe based on whether or not the hard disk has enough
+power to save its memory in the event of a power failure.
+
+## Read performance
+
+We list the performance of reading sequentially in both the forward
+and reverse direction, and also the performance of a random lookup.
+Note that the database created by the benchmark is quite small.
+Therefore the report characterizes the performance of leveldb when the
+working set fits in memory. The cost of reading a piece of data that
+is not present in the operating system buffer cache will be dominated
+by the one or two disk seeks needed to fetch the data from disk.
+Write performance will be mostly unaffected by whether or not the
+working set fits in memory.
+
+ readrandom : 16.677 micros/op; (approximately 60,000 reads per second)
+ readseq : 0.476 micros/op; 232.3 MB/s
+ readreverse : 0.724 micros/op; 152.9 MB/s
+
+LevelDB compacts its underlying storage data in the background to
+improve read performance. The results listed above were done
+immediately after a lot of random writes. The results after
+compactions (which are usually triggered automatically) are better.
+
+ readrandom : 11.602 micros/op; (approximately 85,000 reads per second)
+ readseq : 0.423 micros/op; 261.8 MB/s
+ readreverse : 0.663 micros/op; 166.9 MB/s
+
+Some of the high cost of reads comes from repeated decompression of blocks
+read from disk. If we supply enough cache to the leveldb so it can hold the
+uncompressed blocks in memory, the read performance improves again:
+
+ readrandom : 9.775 micros/op; (approximately 100,000 reads per second before compaction)
+ readrandom : 5.215 micros/op; (approximately 190,000 reads per second after compaction)
+
+## Repository contents
+
+See doc/index.html for more explanation. See doc/impl.html for a brief overview of the implementation.
+
+The public interface is in include/*.h. Callers should not include or
+rely on the details of any other header files in this package. Those
+internal APIs may be changed without warning.
+
+Guide to header files:
+
+* **include/db.h**: Main interface to the DB: Start here
+
+* **include/options.h**: Control over the behavior of an entire database,
+and also control over the behavior of individual reads and writes.
+
+* **include/comparator.h**: Abstraction for user-specified comparison function.
+If you want just bytewise comparison of keys, you can use the default
+comparator, but clients can write their own comparator implementations if they
+want custom ordering (e.g. to handle different character encodings, etc.)
+
+* **include/iterator.h**: Interface for iterating over data. You can get
+an iterator from a DB object.
+
+* **include/write_batch.h**: Interface for atomically applying multiple
+updates to a database.
+
+* **include/slice.h**: A simple module for maintaining a pointer and a
+length into some other byte array.
+
+* **include/status.h**: Status is returned from many of the public interfaces
+and is used to report success and various kinds of errors.
+
+* **include/env.h**:
+Abstraction of the OS environment. A posix implementation of this interface is
+in util/env_posix.cc
+
+* **include/table.h, include/table_builder.h**: Lower-level modules that most
+clients probably won't use directly