* @dgraph-io/maintainers

We wrote Badger with these design goals in mind:

- Write a key-value database in pure Go

- Use latest research to build the fastest KV database for data sets spanning terabytes

- Optimize for modern storage devices

Badger’s design is based on a paper titled

[WiscKey: Separating Keys from Values in SSD-conscious Storage](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast16/fast16-papers-lu.pdf).

The following blog posts are a great starting point for learning more about Badger and the

underlying design principles:

- [Introducing Badger: A fast key-value store written natively in Go](https://hypermode.com/blog/badger/)

- [Make Badger crash resilient with ALICE](https://hypermode.com/blog/alice/)

- [Badger vs LMDB vs BoltDB: Benchmarking key-value databases in Go](https://hypermode.com/blog/badger-lmdb-boltdb/)

- [Concurrent ACID Transactions in Badger](https://hypermode.com/blog/badger-txn/)

| Feature | Badger | RocksDB | BoltDB |

| ----------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | ---------------------------- | ------- |

| Design | LSM tree with value log | LSM tree only | B+ tree |

| High Read throughput | Yes | No | Yes |

| High Write throughput | Yes | Yes | No |

| Designed for SSDs | Yes (with latest research¹) | Not specifically² | No |

| Embeddable | Yes | Yes | Yes |

| Sorted KV access | Yes | Yes | Yes |

| Pure Go (no Cgo) | Yes | No | Yes |

| Transactions | Yes | Yes | Yes |

| ACID-compliant | Yes, concurrent with SSI³ | No | Yes |

| Snapshots | Yes | Yes | Yes |

| TTL support | Yes | Yes | No |

| 3D access (key-value-version) | Yes⁴ | No | No |

¹ The WiscKey paper (on which Badger is based) saw big wins with separating values from

keys, significantly reducing the write amplification compared to a typical LSM tree.

² RocksDB is an SSD-optimized version of LevelDB, which was designed specifically for

rotating disks. As such RocksDB's design isn't aimed at SSDs.

³ SSI: Serializable Snapshot Isolation. For more details, see the blog post

[Concurrent ACID Transactions in Badger](https://hypermode.com/blog/badger-txn/)

⁴ Badger provides direct access to value versions via its Iterator API. Users can also

specify how many versions to keep per key via Options.

We've run comprehensive benchmarks against RocksDB, BoltDB, and LMDB. The benchmarking code with

detailed logs are in the [badger-bench](https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger-bench) repo.

BadgerDB is an embeddable, persistent, and fast key-value (KV) database written in pure Go. It is

the underlying database for [Dgraph](https://github.com/dgraph-io/dgraph), a fast, distributed graph

database. It is meant to be an efficient alternative to non-Go-based key-value stores like RocksDB.

We keep the [repo Changelog](https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md) up to date

with each release.

[Quickstart](quickstart.md)

[Design](design.md)

[Troubleshooting](troubleshooting.md)