The system design library
Search and filter every curated system design video, article, repository and paper in one place.
22 resources
Readings in Database Systems (the Red Book)
Essays and papers on how database systems are built, with an introduction to each, free online from the editors.
BooksAdvancedFree from the authorBy Peter Bailis, Joseph Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker · Red Book
Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases (paper)
Why Aurora moves the redo log to a distributed storage layer, so replication and crash recovery become cheap.
PapersAdvancedRead hereBy Verbitski et al. · Amazon Web Services
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data (paper)
Google's wide-column store: tablets split by key range, a commit log plus sorted files on disk, and the design later copied by HBase and Cassandra.
PapersAdvancedRead hereBy Chang et al. · Google
Bitcask: a log-structured hash table for fast key/value data
The design note behind Bitcask: append-only files, an in-memory key directory and merging.
PapersAdvancedBy Justin Sheehy and David Smith · Basho Technologies
ClickHouse Blog
Learn about the latest ClickHouse tips, tricks and company announcements.
BlogsIntermediateBy ClickHouse engineers · ClickHouse
CMU 15-445: Database Systems
A university course on database internals with free lecture videos, covering storage, indexing, execution and concurrency.
CoursesAdvancedBy Andy Pavlo · Carnegie Mellon University
CMU Database Group
Lectures and talks on database systems, including the 15-445 course.
YouTubeAdvancedBy Carnegie Mellon University
Database Internals
How storage engines and distributed databases work, from B-trees and LSM-trees to consensus and replication.
BooksAdvancedSold by publisherBy Alex Petrov · O'Reilly
Datadog Engineering Blog
How an observability company builds high-volume time-series and tracing systems.
BlogsAdvancedBy Datadog engineers · Datadog
Dropbox Tech Blog
Infrastructure, storage and sync write-ups from Dropbox.
BlogsIntermediateBy Dropbox engineers · Dropbox
HaloDB: Embedded Key-Value Storage Engine at Yahoo
yahoodevelopers: By Arjun Mannaly, Senior Software Engineer At Oath, multiple ad platforms use a high throughput, low latency distributed key-value database that runs in data centers all over the world. The database stores billions of re…
Case StudiesAdvancedBy Yahoo engineers · Yahoo
How SQLite Works
A tour of how a small, widely deployed database stores data and stays crash safe.
DocumentationIntermediateBy SQLite team · SQLite
Inside the Magic Pocket
How Dropbox built its own exabyte-scale block storage, including durability and cost choices.
Case StudiesAdvancedRead hereBy Dropbox
LevelDB
A small, readable LSM-tree key-value store, a good first storage engine to study.
GitHubAdvancedBy Google · GitHub
MinIO documentation
An S3-compatible object store: erasure coding, buckets and deployment.
DocumentationIntermediateBy MinIO
Redis persistence
Snapshots versus the append-only file, and the durability trade-offs of each.
DocumentationIntermediateBy Redis · Redis Ltd.
RocksDB
An embeddable LSM-tree storage engine used inside many databases.
GitHubAdvancedBy Meta · GitHub
RocksDB Engineering Blog
RocksDB is an embeddable persistent key-value store for fast storage.
BlogsIntermediateBy RocksDB engineers · RocksDB
The Google File System (paper)
How Google built a file system for huge files and constant machine failures: one master for metadata, many chunk servers, and append-heavy workloads. The ancestor of HDFS.
PapersAdvancedBy Ghemawat, Gobioff and Leung · Google
The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (paper)
The original LSM-tree paper behind write-optimised stores such as Cassandra and RocksDB.
PapersAdvancedBy O'Neil et al. · UMass Boston
USENIX Conferences
The proceedings of top systems conferences (OSDI, NSDI, ATC), mostly free to read.
PapersAdvancedBy USENIX