Key-Value Database

Databases supporting mappings of arbitrary byte sequences.

Interfaces

The database interface types consist of objects to encapsulate the singular connection to the DB, transactions being made to it, historical version state, and iteration.

DBConnection

This interface represents a connection to a versioned key-value database. All versioning operations are performed using methods on this type.

• The Versions method returns a VersionSet which represents an immutable view of the version history at the current state.
• Version history is modified via the {Save,Delete}Version methods.
• Operations on version history do not modify any database contents.

DBReader, DBWriter, and DBReadWriter

These types represent transactions on the database contents. Their methods provide CRUD operations as well as iteration.

• Writeable transactions call Commit flushes operations to the source DB.
• All open transactions must be closed with Discard or Commit before a new version can be saved on the source DB.
• The maximum number of safely concurrent transactions is dependent on the backend implementation.
• A single transaction object is not safe for concurrent use.
• Write conflicts on concurrent transactions will cause an error at commit time (optimistic concurrency control).

Iterator

• An iterator is invalidated by any writes within its Domain to the source transaction while it is open.
• An iterator must call Close before its source transaction is closed.

VersionSet

This represents a self-contained and immutable view of a database's version history state. It is therefore safe to retain and conccurently access any instance of this object.

Implementations

In-memory DB

The in-memory DB in the db/memdb package cannot be persisted to disk. It is implemented using the Google btree library.

• This currently does not perform write conflict detection, so it only supports a single open write-transaction at a time. Multiple and concurrent read-transactions are supported.

BadgerDB

A BadgerDB-based backend. Internally, this uses BadgerDB's "managed" mode for version management. Note that Badger only recognizes write conflicts for rows that are read after a conflicting transaction was opened. In other words, the following will raise an error:

tx1, tx2 := db.Writer(), db.ReadWriter()
key := []byte("key")
tx2.Get(key)
tx1.Set(key, []byte("a"))
tx2.Set(key, []byte("b"))
tx1.Commit()        // ok
err := tx2.Commit() // err is non-nil

But this will not:

tx1, tx2 := db.Writer(), db.ReadWriter()
key := []byte("key")
tx1.Set(key, []byte("a"))
tx2.Set(key, []byte("b"))
tx1.Commit() // ok
tx2.Commit() // ok

RocksDB

A RocksDB-based backend. Internally this uses OptimisticTransactionDB to allow concurrent transactions with write conflict detection. Historical versioning is internally implemented with Checkpoints.