tursodatabase/turso

Investigate Bw-Tree for MVCC

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#3,632 opened on Oct 8, 2025

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Description

Our MVCC implementation is inspired by Hekaton, but we don't have one key component, which is the Bw-Tree.

Let's look into implementing Bw-Tree in Rust based on these papers and open source C++ implementation:

https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2016/papers/bwtree-icde2013.pdf

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2018/mod342-wangA.pdf

https://github.com/wangziqi2013/BwTree

In fact, https://github.com/spacejam/sled uses a similar approach too I believe.

Contributor guide

Research direction
Study the Bw Tree papers and the C++ reference implementation to understand the design, then evaluate how to implement it in Rust for the existing MVCC codebase. Examine sled's approach for inspiration.
Tech stack
rust
Domain
database
Issue type
Research
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Mostly clear
Prerequisites
RustDatabase internals
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
40