RocksDB
Original author	Dhruba Borthakur
Developers	Meta Platforms (was Facebook, Inc.)
Initial release	May 2012; 13 years ago (2012-05)
Stable release	10.2.1[1]  / 24 April 2025
Repository	github.com/facebook/rocksdb
Written in	C++
Operating system	Windows,macOS,Linux,FreeBSD,OpenBSD,Solaris,AIX
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Embedded database
License	Apache 2.0 orGPL 2
Website	rocksdb.org

RocksDB is a high performance^{[2][3][4][5][6]}embedded database forkey-value data. It is afork of Google'sLevelDB optimized to exploitmulti-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such assolid-state drives (SSD), forinput/output (I/O)bound workloads. It is based on alog-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) data structure. It is written inC++ and provides officiallanguage bindings forC++,C, andJava. Manythird-party language bindings exist. RocksDB isfree and open-source software, released originally under aBSD 3-clause license.^[7][8][9] However, in July 2017 the project was migrated to a dual license of bothApache 2.0 andGPLv2 license.^[10] This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.^[11][12]

RocksDB is used in production systems at variousweb-scale enterprises^[13] includingFacebook,Yahoo!,^[14] andLinkedIn.^[15]

RocksDB, likeLevelDB, stores keys and values in arbitrary byte arrays, and data is sorted byte-wise by key or by providing a custom comparator.

RocksDB provides all of the features of LevelDB, plus:

• Transactions^[16]
• Backups^[17] andsnapshots^[18]
• Column families^[19]
• Bloom filters^[20]
• Time to live (TTL) support^[21]
• Universal compaction^[22]
• Merge operators^[23]
• Statistics collection^[24]
• Geospatial indexing^[25]

and others.^[26]

RocksDB is not anSQL database (althoughMyRocks combines RocksDB withMySQL). Like otherNoSQL anddbm stores, it has norelational data model, and it does not support SQL queries. Also, it has no direct support for secondary indexes, however a user may build their own internally using Column Families or externally. Applications use RocksDB as alibrary, as it provides no server orcommand-line interface.

RocksDB was created atFacebook by Dhruba Borthakur^[27][28] in April 2012, as a fork ofLevelDB with the initial stated goal of improving performance for server workloads.^[29][30]

As an embeddable database, RocksDB can be used as a storage engine within a largerdatabase management system (DBMS). For example,Rockset uses RocksDB^[31] mostly for analytical data processing.

The following projects have been started to replace or offer alternative storage engines for already-established database systems with RocksDB:

ArangoDB has added RocksDB to its previous storage engine ("mmfiles").^[32] RocksDB is be the default storage engine since ArangoDB 3.4.^[33]

Cassandra on RocksDB can improve the performance of Apache Cassandra significantly (3–4 times faster in general, 100 times faster in some use-cases).^{[citation needed]} The Instagram team at Facebook developed and open-sourced their code, along with benchmarks of their performance results.^[34]

MariaDB can use the MyRocks storage engine (which is forked from RocksDB) since MariaDB 10.2.5 (Alpha status)^[35] and stable since MariaDB 10.2.16 in 2018.^[36]

The MongoRocks project provides a storage module forMongoDB where the storage engine is RocksDB.^[37][38][39]

A related program is Rocks Strata, a tool written inGo, which allows managing incremental backups of MongoDB when RocksDB is used as the storage engine.^[40]

The MyRocks project created a new RocksDB-based storage engine forMySQL.^[41][42] In-depth details about MyRocks were presented at Percona Live 2016.^[43]

Oxigraph^[44] is agraph database implementing theSPARQL standard, based on RocksDB

The UKV^[45] project allows users to use RocksDB on par withLevelDB as the underlyingkey-value store. It represents a shared abstraction forcreate, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations common to every storage engine. It augments it with structured bindings for several high-level languages, includingPython,Java, andGo.

The following database systems and applications have chosen to use RocksDB as their embedded storage engine:

TheCeph's BlueStore storage layer uses RocksDB for metadata management in OSD devices.^[46]

Apache Flink uses RocksDB to store checkpoints.^[47]

FusionDB^[48] uses RocksDB as its storage engine for XML, Key/Value, and JSON.^[49]

LogDevice's LogsDB is built atop RocksDB.^[50]

Kafka Streams uses RocksDB for its state stores.^[51]

The Manhattan Distributed Key-Value Store has used RocksDB as its primary engine to store Twitter data since 2018.^[52]

TheRockset^[53] service that is used for operational data analytics uses RocksDB as its storage engine.^[54]

The ssdb-rocks^[55] project uses RocksDB as the storage engine for the SSDB^[56] NoSQL Database.

The TiDB^[57] project uses RocksDB as its storage engine.^[58]

TheYugabyteDB database uses a modified version of RocksDB as part of its DocDB storage engine.^[59]

Third-party programming language bindings available for RocksDB include:

• Ordered Key-Value Store

• Official website

• Bigtable implementations
• NoSQL
• Database engines
• Embedded databases
• C++ libraries
• Facebook software
• Key-value databases
• Ordered Key-Value Store

• CS1 errors: missing title
• CS1 errors: bare URL
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