by Angela Guess
A new NoSQL database has been open-sourced by Google. According to the announcement, “Google open-sourced a BigTable-inspired key-value database library called LevelDB under a BSD license. It was created by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat of the BigTable project at Google. It’s available for Unix based systems, Mac OS X, Windows, and Android… LevelDB is not a database server like other other key-value stores like Redis or Membase. Instead, it would most likely be used as an embedded database for other applications, much the way SQLite or Berkley DB are used. The technical advantage to using LevelDB instead of other key-value stores is its support for ordered data. Also, its BSD license is more liberal than the GPL Sleepycat license of Berkley DB.”
Features of LevelDB include the following: “Keys and values are arbitrary byte arrays. Data is stored sorted by key. Callers can provide a custom comparison function to override the sort order. The basic operations are Put(key,value), Get(key), Delete(key). Multiple changes can be made in one atomic batch. Users can create a transient snapshot to get a consistent view of data. Forward and backward iteration is supported over the data. Data is automatically compressed using the Snappy compression library. External activity (file system operations etc.) is relayed through a virtual interface so users can customize the operating system interactions. Detailed documentation about how to use the library is included with the source code.”
photo credit: Google
