Systems on Hrushikesh Dokala

building snaildb 🐌 : embedded, persistent key-value store written in rust

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i decided to experiment with building a key-value store in rust as a fun project to both learn the language and dive into writing the low-level data structures and algorithms used in databases. inspiration was to see how far i could push the limits of a kv store compared to existing solutions like rocksdb and leveldb, especially after reading up on architectural concepts like bare-metal designs, object storage-based databases, and the bf-tree paper. this project is my way of getting hands-on experience and satisfying my curiosity about database internals, might turn out to be production ready db in future. (start date: 02 december 2025, not really sure when this gets finished)

vitess architecture

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

first of all, im very inspired by @samlambert, ceo of planetscale. i was curious enough to explore the planetscale.com (fastest dbs available in cloud with their fast NVMe drives) and found something interesting, which is vitess.

there is a lot going on, in their website but the vitess, allows mysql dbs to scale horizontally through sharding. which is very interesting. so thought of digging deeper into it. one of the questions i had was - “what is the exact problem vitess solves for mysql?”.

ring deployment architecture

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

there are many ways to roll out a new product, feature or even a new version of an existing product to the users. but orgs often face challenge when the scale of users is very high, which they dont trust the tests run in local or even staging environments.

in this blog, lets understand one of the ways to roll out a new version/feature to the large number of users in a safe and reliable way with minimal blast radius.