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FerrisDB

Learn by Building

Tutorial Series

Section titled “Tutorial Series”

Our tutorials progressively build up database knowledge, starting from simple concepts and advancing to distributed systems.

Available Tutorials

Section titled “Available Tutorials”
Tutorial 01: Building a Key-Value Store Start your journey by building a simple in-memory key-value store with HashMap. Learn about basic storage operations, error handling, and the builder pattern.

Coming Soon

Section titled “Coming Soon”

Tutorial 02: Write-Ahead Logging

PLANNED

Learn durability by implementing a WAL:

  • Binary file formats
  • Checksums for integrity
  • Crash recovery
  • fsync trade-offs

Tutorial 03: Building a Skip List

PLANNED

Implement a concurrent data structure: - Probabilistic balancing - Lock-free reads - Memory ordering - Performance analysis

Tutorial 04: SSTable Implementation

PLANNED

Build persistent sorted storage: - Binary search in files - Block-based format - Compression basics - Index structures

Tutorial 05: LSM-Tree Storage Engine

PLANNED

Combine components into an engine:

  • Write path flow
  • Read path merging
  • Compaction strategies
  • Performance tuning

Tutorial Philosophy

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What Makes Our Tutorials Different

Section titled “What Makes Our Tutorials Different”
  1. Real Implementation: You build actual working code, not toy examples
  2. Progressive Complexity: Each tutorial builds on previous knowledge
  3. Deep Understanding: Learn the “why” behind design decisions
  4. Practical Skills: Write production-quality Rust code
  5. Test-Driven: Every implementation includes comprehensive tests

What You’ll Learn

Section titled “What You’ll Learn”

Database Internals

  • Storage engines
  • Durability mechanisms
  • Concurrency control
  • Query processing

Rust Mastery

  • Systems programming - Safe concurrency - Performance optimization - Error handling

Engineering Practices

  • Test-driven development
  • Benchmarking
  • API design
  • Documentation

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”

Before starting the tutorials:

  • Rust Knowledge: Comfortable with ownership, borrowing, and basic syntax
  • Command Line: Familiar with terminal/shell commands
  • Git: Basic version control understanding
  • Curiosity: Eager to understand how databases work!

Don’t worry if you’re not an expert - the tutorials explain concepts as needed.

Getting Started

Section titled “Getting Started”

Ready to begin? Start with Tutorial 01: Building a Key-Value Store and work your way through the series.

Each tutorial includes:

  • Step-by-step implementation
  • Exercises to test understanding
  • Complete solutions
  • Performance benchmarks
  • Real-world context