Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jakewins 1253 days ago
I mean, so are the relational databases. Rocks provides similar storage primitives - trees - as most databases implement internally.

Postgres is “just” a SQL engine running on top of a key-value heap and trees pointing into it.

Neo4j is the same, key-value record store plus trees.

Rocks and it’s peers have made that into a dependable library, making new db dev that much faster :)
1 comments
mattashii 1253 days ago
> Postgres is “just” a SQL engine running on top of a key-value heap and trees pointing into it.

I wouldn't call heaps a key-value data structure; even if you could argue that the location of your data is an implicit key. And the trees are strictly optional - you could build your database with only hash and brin indexes.

link
jakewins 1252 days ago
Yeah agree, I had the same thought after I wrote that comment “wait dumbass, you don’t get to pick the key in the heap, it’s not the same”.

But still, you get what I’m getting at: in the end, the relational dbs, internally, build on top of abstractions that are things like trees, key-value structures, heaps, logs etc.

link