Fast key-value store LevelDB released by Google

LevelDB is a new, fast, lightweight key-value storage engine that has been announced by Google to compete with libraries such as SQLite and Kyoto Cabinet's TreeDB. A precursor of the C++ library, which has been open sourced under a BSD-style licence, can be found powering Google's BigTable system. LevelDB is designed to have low dependencies on other libraries and has already been ported to various Unix-based systems, Mac OS X, Windows and Android. It will be used in an upcoming version of Chrome to power the browser's HTML5 IndexedDB implementation.

Google Fellows and authors of LevelDB, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, write that LevelDB's advantage is that it is optimised for batch updates with widely scattered keys. Benchmarks show LevelDB managing 164,000 random write operations per second, compared to Kyoto TreeDB's 88,500 per second and SQLite3's 420 per second.

The developers of the Riak distributed database have also been working on implementing LevelDB as an optional storage engine in their system. In their testing, they compared LevelDB with InnoDB and results showed a higher throughput and similar latency in their test scenarios. Though they are not planning on replacing the current Bitcask storage engine, they are working on making LevelDB an option for massive tables.

LevelDB is available in source code form from the project's Google Code site.

(djwm)