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João Henrique Machado Silva
João Henrique Machado Silva

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What would SQLite look like if written in Rust? — Part 0

Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in Rust

Part 1 — Understanding SQLite and Setting up CLI Application and REPL

Part 2 — SQL Statement and Meta Commands Parser + Error Handling

Let's get the obvious out of the way, why am I doing this? Do I want to develop the next great embedded DB of the 21st century? Not really.

What I cannot create, I do not understand. — Richard Feynman

I am really doing it in order to understand better the works of it, and my goal is to document everything along the way. Wish me luck!

  • So how does a database work?
  • What format is data saved in? In our case, in memory and on disk.
  • When does it mode from memory to disk? How would that work exactly?
  • Why we only have one primary key per table? Do you know?
  • How does rolling back a transaction work?
  • How are indexes formatted? And how do they work?
  • When and how does a full table scan happen? Does it happen every time we issue a query? Do the indexes help? How?
  • What format is a prepared statement saved in?
  • What extra features can we add to our DB, if any?

Well, these are some of the questions I aim to answer along the way. And for that I will be relying heavily on the SQLite Architecture Documentation (https://www.sqlite.org/arch.html) and also here (https://www.sqlite.org/zipvfs/doc/trunk/www/howitworks.wiki).

sqlite architecture (https://www.sqlite.org/arch.html)

View on Github (pull requests are welcome)

And hey, I would be lying if I said I got the idea out of the blue, no I didn't. I got the inspiration from this other great developer called Connor, that basically did the same thing, but in C, right here (https://cstack.github.io/db_tutorial/), if you wanna check it out!

If you wanna follow this track don't forget to follow me here on Dev.to and also give some love!

Continue to Part 1 →

Cheers!

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