It's Time to Stop Building KV Databases

March 24, 2025 It's Time to Stop Building KV Databases I'm so sick of Key-Value. The most unopinionated, uninspired data model that is a pain to use for anything. They're very popular! Among database vendors. Or, specifically, storage engine vendors. They love to offer you a byte array to byte array map, and if they are feeling particularly generous, it might even be ordered so that you can do range scans. The problem is that the only thing that a KV interface is good for is as a building block for a reasonable data model. This being the primitive means that everyone who uses a KV database has to do that from scratch. And they (read: me) usually do a middling job of it, because it's not actually the problem they were setting out to solve. Yes: we could have a third-party library that is built to sit atop RocksDB. That is the natural "separation of concerns" answer. But look: are you going to use some guy's Rust library with 300 dependencies in its Cargo.toml and an anime logo? Beca ... Read full article.