This blog covers the function and implementation compactions, focusing on those details and configurations that are relevant to YugabyteDB. The second half focuses on the behavior and prioritization of background compactions.
When I first started my graduate studies in databases in 2012, I remember reading a freshly-minted paper that was making big waves in the DB community: Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database. I remember being blown away by the scale of the problems being tackled. Synchronizing a globally-distributed database while maintaining a usable transaction latency seemed an impossible task, one that comes with challenges that only exist on the global scale. As a naive grad student,
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