Name: Database Internals
ISBN: 9781492040347

Database Internals

When it comes to choosing, using, and maintaining a database, understanding its internals is essential. But with so many distributed databases and tools available today, it's often difficult to understand what each one offers and how they differ. With this practical guide, Alex Petrov guides developers through the concepts behind modern database and storage engine internals. Throughout the book, you'll explore relevant material gleaned from numerous books, papers, blog posts, and the source code of several open source databases. These resources are listed at the end of parts one and two. You'll discover that the most significant distinctions among many modern databases reside in subsystems that determine how storage is organized and how data is distributed. This book examines: Storage engines: Explore storage classification and taxonomy, and dive into B-Tree-based and immutable Log Structured storage engines, with differences and use-cases for each Storage building blocks: Learn how database files are organized to build efficient storage, using auxiliary data structures such as Page Cache, Buffer Pool and Write-Ahead Log Distributed systems: Learn step-by-step how nodes and processes connect and build complex communication patterns Database clusters: Which consistency models are commonly used by modern databases and how distributed storage systems achieve consistency

What Hacker News says

bddickenApr 2026

It's really just a matter of tradeoffs. B-trees are great, but are better suited for high read % and medium/low write volume. In the opposite case, things like LSMs are typically better suited.

If you want a comprehensive resource, I'd recommend reading either Designing Data Intensive Applications (Kleppman) or Database Internals (Petrov). Both have chapters on B-trees and LSMs.

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sargstuffMar 2025

Load balancing / APIs / latency / replicating data is usually handled at OS level (drivers, 'database as an os', traditional 'os', 'caching', memory,hard drive, network load balancing )

Programming languate data structure level detail : "Database Internals, A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work" by Alex Petrov

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skrtskrtFeb 2025

I also recommend "Database Internals" to people. An invaluable book, the logical next read after "Designing Data-Intensive Applications". It's the best and most approachable resource on distributed systems and database consistency / performance tradeoffs I have found.

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cforsOct 2024

While not strictly for RDBMS, I think this book is pretty close!

https://www.databass.dev/

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tontintonJan 2024

For a while now I had the urge to learn how to pick the "right" database for projects, I looked around online at different databases to try to understand their different traits, and was bombarded with marketing instead of actual info on the advantages and drawbacks.

The only solution for me was to learn some database internals (I read the wonderful book written by Alex Petrov), and the problems seemed so interesting, I could not fight the urge and went ahead with trying to write my own db.

Anyway, ~9 months have passed and I feel like I'm "done", I have learned a ton, and really proud of dbeel.

Now I can pick a database and way more easily understand what are its most defining traits.

Some short time in the future, I will release a blog post or something, where I will write about the fundamental problems you need to solve when writing a performant data system like a database, so stay tuned :)

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rx987Jan 2024

database internals by alex petrov comes to mind.

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