February 2026
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
21h 56m
English
Content preview from Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 4. Storage and Retrieval
One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong. And so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently. A computer does not primarily compute in the sense of doing arithmetic. […] They primarily are filing systems.
Richard Feynman, Idiosyncratic Thinking seminar (1985)
On the most fundamental level, a database needs to do two things: when you give it some data, it should store the data, and when you ask it again later, it should give the data back to you.
In Chapter 3 we discussed data models and query languages—that is, the format in which you give the database your data, and the interface through which you can ask for it again later. In this chapter we discuss the same from the database’s point of view: how the database can store the data that you give it, and how it can find the data again when you ask for it.
Why should you, as an application developer, care how the database handles storage and retrieval internally? You’re probably not going to implement your own storage engine from scratch, but you do need to select a storage engine that is appropriate for your application, from the many that are available. In order to configure a storage engine to perform well on your kind of workload, you need to have a rough idea of what the storage engine is doing under the hood.
In particular, there is a big difference between storage engines that are optimized ...
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