Why we built CockroachDB on top of RocksDB

1 · CockroachDB · Jan. 17, 2019, midnight
If, on a final exam at a database class, you asked students whether to build a database on a log-structured merge tree (LSM) or a BTree-based storage engine, 90% of your students would probably respond that the decision hinges on your workload. “LSMs are for write-heavy workloads and BTrees are for read-heavy workloads”, the conscientious ones would write. If you surveyed most NewSQL databases today, most of them are built on top of an LSM, namely, RocksDB....