Chest: A New Database

Databases are a fundamental part of most modern applications. Studying Hive interested me in database design, so I decided to implement a new database – called Chest.
I created it as a research project, but I'd also be happy to produce something worthwhile.

These are the goals:

• Implement a pure-Dart database from scratch.

• Support storing significant amounts of data that don't fit into RAM.

• Offer a NoSQL-API similar to Firestore.

• Support queries efficiently.

• Have excellent developer experience.

These are non-goals:

• Don't optimize for server use-cases, but focus on clients first.

• Don't offer native sync capabilities with cloud services or peer-to-peer.

• Don't focus on performance over everything else.

I want to emphasize the last non-goal especially. That's not to say I don't care about speed at all – I'll try to keep the time complexity to a minimum and create an architecture that's not inherently slow. But I'll postpone low-level performance optimizations to a (much) later date.

Looking at the goals, this will – unlike Hive – not be an in-memory database but a resource-efficient, full-fledged database that supports vast amounts of data. In this series, I'll document my architecture bottom-up and build lots of small layers of abstraction that each bring us closer to the vision of a complete database.