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