Why LevelDB, All of a Sudden

Something that is no one really seems to be asking is why we started doing all this work with LevelDB all of a sudden. We already have an industry grade solution for storage with Esent. Sure, it doesn’t work with Linux, and that is somewhat important for us. But you would be wrong if you thought that this was why we pursue this.

To be perfectly honest, we want a storage solution that is on our control. Something that we can work with, tweak and understand all on our own. Just about every other tidbit of RavenDB is something that we have full transparency into. Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been through every single line of code in the Lucene codebase, but when we run into problems there, I was able to go into the code and fix stuff.

Esent has been incredibly useful for us, and it has been very stable. But to be able to tweak every last erg of performance and speed, we really need to have a lot more control over the storage layer than we currently have. And no, that doesn’t mean that we are going to abandon Esent. It merely means that we want to have options. And even in our early spikes ,the sort of things our managed implementation of LevelDB provides make implementing things a real breeze.