New article: MiniLSM: A Tutorial of Building Storage Engine in a Week…

… using Rust (#9)

* New article: MiniLSM: A Tutorial of Building Storage Engine in a Week using Rust

* Add tutorial topic

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Signed-off-by: Alex Chi <iskyzh@gmail.com>

---------

Signed-off-by: Alex Chi <iskyzh@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Alex Chi <iskyzh@gmail.com>

content/issue-1/minilsm.md

@@ -0,0 +1,250 @@
+MiniLSM is a working-in-progress tutorial series for building a storage engine. Based on the experience of building
+[AgateDB](https://github.com/tikv/agatedb) and [RisingWave](https://github.com/risingwavelabs/risingwave), MiniLSM
+introduces you the basics of an LSM-tree storage engine with a step-by-step tutorial.
+
+The starter code is accessible on [GitHub](https://github.com/skyzh/mini-lsm), and the tutorial is available on
+[GitHub Pages](https://skyzh.github.io/mini-lsm/).
+
+```urlpreview
+https://github.com/skyzh/mini-lsm
+```
+
+## What is LSM, and Why LSM?
+
+Log-structured merge tree is a data structure to maintain key-value pairs. This data structure is widely used in
+distributed database systems like [TiDB](https://www.pingcap.com) and [CockroachDB](https://www.cockroachlabs.com) as
+their underlying storage engine. [RocksDB](http://rocksdb.org), based on [LevelDB](https://github.com/google/leveldb),
+is an implementation of LSM-tree storage engine. It provides a wide range of key-value access functionalities and is
+used in a lot of production systems.
+
+LSM-tree storage engine usually views keys and values as byte array encoded by users. For example, TiDB encodes a row
+in the table [in the following way](https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/dev/tidb-computing#mapping-table-data-to-key-value):
+
+```
+| row_id | col1 | col2 | col3 |
+|    0   |  1   |  2   |  3   |
+
+key: table1_record00000000
+value: encoded([0, 1, 2, 3])
+```
+
+where the row is encoded into a byte string, so that LSM engine can easily process it.
+
+Generally speaking, LSM Tree is an append-friendly data structure. It is more intuitive to compare LSM to other
+key-value data structure like RB-Tree and B-Tree. For RB-Tree and B-Tree, all data operations are in-place. That is to
+say, when you update the value corresponding to the key, the value will be overwritten at its original memory or disk
+space. But writes in an LSM Tree, i.e., insertions, updates, deletions, are performed in an append-only way. We will
+never change data already written to disk. LSM-tree engine always writes changes to new files (which are called
+sorted-string tables, aka. SSTs) and then merge existing files (via compaction).
+
+This architectural design makes LSM tree easy to work with.
+
+1. Data are immutable on persistent storage, which means that it is easier to offload the background tasks (compaction)
+   to remote servers. It is also feasible to directly store and serve data from cloud-native storage systems like S3.
+2. An LSM tree can balance between read, write and space amplification by changing the compaction algorithm. The data
+   structure itself is super versatile and can be optimized for different workloads.
+
+In this tutorial, we will learn how to build an LSM-tree-based storage engine in the Rust programming language.
+
+## Overview of LSM
+
+An LSM storage engine generally contains 3 parts:
+
+1. Write-ahead log to persist temporary data for recovery.
+2. SSTs on the disk for maintaining a tree structure.
+3. Mem-tables in memory for batching small writes.
+
+The storage engine generally provides the following interfaces:
+
+* `Put(key, value)`: store a key-value pair in the LSM tree.
+* `Delete(key)`: remove a key and its corresponding value.
+* `Get(key)`: get the value corresponding to a key.
+* `Scan(range)`: get a range of key-value pairs.
+
+To ensure persistence,
+
+* `Sync()`: ensure all the operations before `sync` are persisted to the disk.
+
+Some engines choose to combine `Put` and `Delete` into a single operation called `WriteBatch`, which accepts a batch
+of key value pairs.
+
+In this tutorial, we assume the LSM tree is using leveled compaction algorithm, which is commonly used in real-world
+systems.
+
+## Write Flow
+
+![](https://skyzh.github.io/mini-lsm/figures/lsm-tutorial/00-lsm-write-flow.svg)
+
+The write flow of LSM contains 4 steps:
+
+1. Write the key-value pair to write-ahead log, so that it can be recovered after the storage engine crashes.
+2. Write the key-value pair to memtable. After (1) and (2) completes, we can notify the user that the write operation
+   is completed.
+3. When a memtable is full, we will flush it to the disk as an SST file in the background.
+4. We will compact some files in some level into lower levels to maintain a good shape for the LSM tree, so that read
+   amplification is low.
+
+## Read Flow
+
+![](https://skyzh.github.io/mini-lsm/figures/lsm-tutorial/00-lsm-read-flow.svg)
+
+When we want to read a key,
+
+1. We will first probe all the memtables from latest to oldest.
+2. If the key is not found, we will then search the entire LSM tree containing SSTs to find the data.
+
+## Tutorial Overview
+
+![](https://skyzh.github.io/mini-lsm/figures/lsm-tutorial/00-lsm-tutorial-overview.svg)
+
+### Day 1 - Block Encoding
+
+Block is the minimum read unit in LSM. It is of 4KB size in general, similar database pages. In each block, we will
+store a sequence of sorted key value pairs. In day 1, we will explore how to use the `bytes` library to do manual data
+encoding. Also, you will learn how to write RocksDB-style iterator in Rust.
+
+**What you will implement:**
+
+```rust
+impl BlockBuilder {
+    /// Adds a key-value pair to the block. Returns false when the block is full.
+    #[must_use]
+    pub fn add(&mut self, key: &[u8], value: &[u8]) -> bool {
+        unimplemented!()
+    }
+
+    /// Finalize the block.
+    pub fn build(self) -> Block {}
+}
+
+impl BlockIterator {
+    /// Returns the key of the current entry.
+    pub fn key(&self) -> &[u8] {}
+
+    /// Returns the value of the current entry.
+    pub fn value(&self) -> &[u8] {}
+
+    /// Move to the next key in the block.
+    pub fn next(&mut self) {}
+
+    /// Seek to the first key that >= `key`.
+    pub fn seek_to_key(&mut self, key: &[u8]) {}
+}
+```
+
+### Day 2 - Table Encoding
+
+SST (sorted string table) is composed of data blocks and index blocks stored on the disk. Usually, data blocks are
+lazily loaded -- they will not be loaded into the memory until a user requests it. Index blocks can also be loaded
+on-demand, but in this tutorial, we make simple assumptions that all SST index blocks (meta blocks) can fit in memory.
+Generally, an SST file is of 256MB size. In day 2, we will implement SST encoding and learn how to compose RocksDB-style
+iterators together in Rust.
+
+**What you will implement:**
+
+```rust
+impl SsTableBuilder {
+    /// Adds a key-value pair to SSTable
+    pub fn add(&mut self, key: &[u8], value: &[u8]) {}
+
+    /// Builds the SSTable and writes it to the given path. No need to actually write to disk until
+    /// chapter 4 block cache.
+    pub fn build(self, ...) -> Result<SsTable> {}
+}
+
+impl StorageIterator for SsTableIterator {
+    fn value(&self) -> &[u8] {}
+
+    fn key(&self) -> &[u8] {}
+
+    fn is_valid(&self) -> bool {}
+
+    fn next(&mut self) -> Result<()> {}
+}
+```
+
+### Day 3 - Mem Table and Merge Iterators
+
+In this tutorial, we use [crossbeam-skiplist](https://docs.rs/crossbeam-skiplist) as the implementation of memtable. You
+will learn how to use self-referential struct in Rust to erase lifetime from a Rust-style iterator object, and therefore
+being easily composed with other RocksDB-style iterators in the system.
+
+Also, we will see how to implement high-performance merge iterators with correct error handling with Rust's `BinaryHeap`.
+We intentionally avoid using dynamic dispatch (i.e. `Box<dyn Iterator>`) to achieve higher performance. You will need to
+implement two different merge iterators: a two-merge iterator to merge different types of iterators, and a multi-way
+merge iterator to merge multiple iterators of the same type. You will have a better understanding of lifetime and trait
+system in Rust.
+
+**What you will implement:**
+
+```rust
+/// Merge multiple iterators of the same type. If the same key occurs multiple times in some
+/// iterators, perfer the one with smaller index.
+pub struct MergeIterator<I: StorageIterator> {
+    iters: BinaryHeap<HeapWrapper<I>>,
+    current: HeapWrapper<I>,
+}
+
+/// Merges two iterators of different types into one. If the two iterators have the same key, only
+/// produce the key once and prefer the entry from A.
+pub struct TwoMergeIterator<A: StorageIterator, B: StorageIterator> {
+    a: A,
+    b: B,
+}
+
+/// A basic mem-table based on crossbeam-skiplist
+pub struct MemTable {
+    map: crossbeam_skiplist::SkipMap<Bytes, Bytes>,
+}
+```
+
+### Day 4 - Storage Engine and Block Cache
+
+In this part, you will need to compose everything you have implemented in previous parts to build a fully functional
+storage engine. You will explore how surprisingly easy for us to maintain object references and ownerships in a
+multi-thread program with the help of borrow checker.
+
+
+**What you will implement:**
+
+```rust
+impl LsmStorage {
+    /// Get a key from the storage. In day 7, this can be further optimized by using a bloom filter.
+    pub fn get(&self, key: &[u8]) -> Result<Option<Bytes>> {}
+
+    /// Put a key-value pair into the storage by writing into the current memtable.
+    pub fn put(&self, key: &[u8], value: &[u8]) -> Result<()> {}
+
+    /// Remove a key from the storage by writing an empty value.
+    pub fn delete(&self, _key: &[u8]) -> Result<()> {}
+
+    /// Persist data to disk.
+    ///
+    /// In day 3: flush the current memtable to disk as L0 SST.
+    /// In day 6: call `fsync` on WAL.
+    pub fn sync(&self) -> Result<()> {}
+
+    /// Create an iterator over a range of keys.
+    pub fn scan(
+        &self,
+        _lower: Bound<&[u8]>,
+        _upper: Bound<&[u8]>,
+    ) -> Result<FusedIterator<LsmIterator>> {}
+}
+```
+
+## Day 5 - Compaction
+
+We now have an LSM structure, and we can merge some files in the background so as to clean garbage data and improve
+read efficiency. We will use RocksDB's leveled compaction algorithm to do the compaction.
+
+## Day 6 - Recovery
+
+Storage engine should have durability, which means that data won't be lost after the engine crashes. In LSM-tree, we
+achieve durability by using a WAL (write-ahead log). In day 6, you will modify the write path to persist in-memory
+data to disk, and implement recovery process on startup.
+
+## Day 7 - Optimizations
+
+Two key optimizations are widely adapted in today's LSM-tree engines -- prefix key compression and bloom filter. We
+will implement the new key encoding and the bloom filter in the last day.

content/issue-1/zine.toml

@@ -22,6 +22,15 @@ pub_date = "2022-12-24"
 publish = false
 featured = true
 
+[[article]]
+file = "minilsm.md"
+title = "MiniLSM: A Tutorial of Building Storage Engine in a Week using Rust"
+author = "skyzh"
+topic = ["tutorial"]
+pub_date = "2022-12-30"
+publish = false
+featured = true
+
 [[article]]
 file = "contribute-to-rustc.md"
 title = "How I contribute to Rust Compiler"

zine-data.json

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+{
+  "urlPreviews": {
+    "https://github.com/skyzh/mini-lsm": [
+      "skyzh/mini-lsm: A tutorial of building an LSM-Tree storage engine in a week! (WIP)",
+      "A tutorial of building an LSM-Tree storage engine in a week! (WIP) - GitHub",
+      "https://opengraph.githubassets.com/83c82d82a7ab5be32dc4bf96da23f2d066f84fc56aadcfc8e3e866e1472171a9/skyzh/mini-lsm"
+    ]
+  }
+}

zine.toml

@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@ The author of [Rust Search Extension](https://github.com/huhu/rust-search-extens
 lcrossman = { name = "LCrossman", editor = true }
 macko76 = { editor = true }
 zhanghandong = { editor = true }
+skyzh = { avatar = "/static/avatar/skyzh.jpeg" }
 yukang = { name = "Yukang", bio = """
 - [Github](https://github.com/chenyukang)
 - [Blog](https://catcoding.me)
@@ -46,3 +47,4 @@ announcement = {}
 game = { name = "Game development", description = "Topic of rust game development." }
 pr-demystifying = { name = "PR Demystifying", description = "Topic of PR demystifying in Rust community."}
 optimization = {}
+tutorial = {}