How Does a Database Work?

How Does a Database Work? | Let’s Build a Simple Database

What format is data saved in? (in memory and on disk)

When does it move from memory to disk?

Why can there only be one primary key per table?

How does rolling back a transaction work?

How are indexes formatted?

When and how does a full table scan happen?

What format is a prepared statement saved in?

In short, how does a database work ?

I’m building a clone of sqlite from scratch in C in order to understand, and I’m going to document my process as I go.

Table of Contents

Part 1 - Introduction and Setting up the REPL

Part 2 - World’s Simplest SQL Compiler and Virtual Machine

Part 3 - An In-Memory, Append-Only, Single-Table Database

Part 4 - Our First Tests (and Bugs)

Part 5 - Persistence to Disk

Part 6 - The Cursor Abstraction

Part 7 - Introduction to the B-Tree

Part 8 - B-Tree Leaf Node Format

Part 9 - Binary Search and Duplicate Keys

Part 10 - Splitting a Leaf Node

Part 11 - Recursively Searching the B-Tree

Part 12 - Scanning a Multi-Level B-Tree

Part 13 - Updating Parent Node After a Split

Part 14 - Splitting Internal Nodes

Part 15 - Where to go next

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” – Richard Feynman

sqlite architecture (https://www.sqlite.org/arch.html)

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