11–20 of 57 posts
What problem are you solving?
If existing solutions existed what hurdles did you face with them and how did you overcome them with your custom solution?
How do you compare from a performance view? (granted they still need to do this, but at least put in a section about it)
I wrote something like this to optimize disk seeks heavily by returning a reference of 8 byte and keeping a hashtable in memory. A mostly-append only records store that allowing mutations of same key and by rounding size of blobs by power of 2. Written to optimize storage layer for Membase.
I was surprised to see LevelDB ( https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/ ) was missing from the list of storage solutions you tried, because it seems optimal for your use-case. Were you aware of it?
According to GitHub, last commit (which is also initial checkin) is two years old.
I always like it when a company focus on their real problems in job interviews and manage to avoid the brain teaser trap. That way you can have a feeling about the job that you are going to work on there, and see if you really like both work and people.
I'm baffled by the choice of using the GNU autofools chain just to include a Doxygen target in the Makefile. The whole thing is essentially straight up C with just 1 library dependency. The command line argument processing is also quite haphazardly done, it's not like it using getopt or whatever that poses compatibility issues. Is writing and packaging with a Makefile that difficult?
They wrote a database to solve an operational need. From experience I can tell you that's an endeavour you should strife to spend as little time on as possible. I think it's a miracle they produced something they feel comfortable sharing with the world. If you write a database in house, and the tool chain and the argument processing are the only things done haphazardly, then hats off to you :)
I'm struggling to find something that it does that a webserver pointed at the filesystem doesn't do (with hash-ids for file names). I'm wondering if that's all it is, with a bit of logic to write the files in the correct structure.