[jules]

Fair enough, I don't see any problem with in memory benchmarks, as long as they are marked as such, and if you're comparing apples to apples. The best way to do this being actually using the data from the read queries to do some trivial operation like computing the XOR hash -- that would still be a best case for your library yet still real world.

I've read the papers on your DB and they are quite interesting. What do you think about the work in the paper linked in this post? It's unfortunate that they just compare with skip lists. I don't think anybody seriously believes skip lists are a good idea ever, so it's a bit of a straw man at this point (though I may be wrong).

[hyc_symas]

I find the Bw-tree work pretty underwhelming. It's not a transactional engine; the fact that it can operate "latch-free" is irrelevant since it must be wrapped by some higher concurrency management layer to truly be useful. The delta-update mechanism is probably more write-efficient than LMDB, which could be a point in their favor. The fact that they still rely on an application-level page cache manager is a strong negative - you can never manage the cache more accurately and more efficiently than the kernel, which gets hardware assist for free. Overall, it's an awful lot of noise being made over not much actual innovation.