Introduction to Key-value Stores

Motivation

A key-value store is one of the fundamental building blocks for many distributed services. For some use cases, a key-value store is used as a caching layer between the front-end services and the back-end persistent stores to speed up reads and writes. For other use cases, a key-value store provides a foundation to build NoSQL databases as they are also a type of non-relational data store (Google’s Bigtable is one example).

What we will learn

We’ve selected the following four papers on key-value systems to discuss in the following chapters:

• [MC] M. Berezecki, E. Frachtenberg, M. Paleczny, and K. Steele. 2011. Many-core key-value store. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Green Computing Conference and Workshops (IGCC '11). IEEE Computer Society, USA, 1–8.

• [SILT] Hyeontaek Lim, Bin Fan, ...