SSTable and Log Structured Storage: LevelDB by Ilya Grigorik.
From the post:
If Protocol Buffers is the lingua franca of individual data record at Google, then the Sorted String Table (
SSTable) is one of the most popular outputs for storing, processing, and exchanging datasets. As the name itself implies, an SSTable is a simple abstraction to efficiently store large numbers of key-value pairs while optimizing for high throughput, sequential read/write workloads.Unfortunately, the SSTable name itself has also been overloaded by the industry to refer to services that go well beyond just the sorted table, which has only added unnecessary confusion to what is a very simple and a useful data structure on its own. Let’s take a closer look under the hood of an SSTable and how LevelDB makes use of it.
How important is this data structure? It or a variant used by Google’s BigTable, Hadoop’s HBase, and Cassandra, among others.
Whether this will work for your purposes is another question, but it never hurts to know more today than you did yesterday.