Storage Engines: B-Trees vs LSM-Trees
Pages and in-place updates vs append-only logs, SSTables and compaction. Lesson 1 of Level 8: Data-Intensive Systems. Based on DDIA.
Level 8 · Data-Intensive Systems · Lesson 1 of 15
Pages and in-place updates vs append-only logs, SSTables and compaction.
Continue learning
- Trade-off Analysis: Thinking Like an Architect — Previous lesson
- Indexes: Fast Reads, Slower Writes — Next lesson
- Level 8: Data-Intensive Systems — Back to the level
Try it hands-on
- B-Tree vs LSM-Tree — Insert keys into both engines side by side and watch page splits, memtable flushes, SSTables and compaction happen.
- Database Index — Query 10,000 ShopFlow orders with and without an index; count rows examined and see write costs rise.
- Database Internals Lab — Storage engines, indexes, replication and partitioning.
All lessons in Data Systems
- Storage Engines: B-Trees vs LSM-Trees
- Indexes: Fast Reads, Slower Writes
- Caching: Speed at the Cost of Truth
- Replication: Leaders, Followers & Failover
- Replication Lag: When Your Own Write Disappears
- Partitioning: Hash, Range, Hotspots & Rebalancing
- Transactions & What ACID Actually Promises
- Isolation Levels: Dirty Reads to Serializable
- Lost Updates: Optimistic vs Pessimistic Locking
- The Trouble With Distributed Systems
- Consistency Models, CAP & Consensus
- Logs & Kafka: Partitions, Offsets and Ordering
- Consumer Groups & Delivery Semantics
- Batch vs Stream Processing & Data Pipelines
- Event Sourcing & CQRS