Crashproofing the Original NoSQL Key-Value Store

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2021-09-23 02:00:08

This episode of Drill Bits unveils a new crash-tolerance mechanism that vaults the venerable gdbm database into the league of transactional NoSQL data stores. We'll motivate this upgrade by tracing gdbm's history. We'll survey the subtle science of crashproofing, navigating a minefield of traps for the unwary. We'll arrive at a compact and rugged design that leverages modern file-system features, and we'll tour the production-ready implementation of this design and its ergonomic interface.

Ken Thompson wrote the original dbm amid a storied golden age. Sparked by Unix, software creativity flourished at Bell Labs in the 1970s, producing an ecosystem10 that remains vibrant decades later. The parent company's ambient technology may have inspired staff to re-imagine data organization, with profound consequences:

IBM OS builders worked in a place where data lived on unit record equipment (80‑column cards, 132‑column printers, etc.) and built a file system that looked like that. Ken and Dennis worked in a phone company where data traveled in streams over wires, and built a system in which files looked like that.3