Block Builder and Block Iterator

In this part, you will need to modify:

  • src/block/builder.rs
  • src/block/iterator.rs
  • src/block.rs

You can use cargo x copy-test day1 to copy our provided test cases to the starter code directory. After you have finished this part, use cargo x scheck to check the style and run all test cases. If you want to write your own test cases, write a new module #[cfg(test)] mod user_tests { /* your test cases */ } in block.rs. Remember to remove #![allow(...)] at the top of the modules you modified so that cargo clippy can actually check the styles.

Task 1 - Block Builder

Block is the minimum read unit in LSM. It is of 4KB size in general, similar database pages. In each block, we will store a sequence of sorted key value pairs.

You will need to modify BlockBuilder to build the encoded data and the offset array. The block contains two parts: data and offsets.

|          data         |           offsets         |
|entry|entry|entry|entry|offset|offset|offset|offset|num_of_elements|

When user adds a key-value pair to a block (which is an entry), we will need to serialize it into the following format:

|                             entry1                            |
| key_len (2B) | key (keylen) | value_len (2B) | value (varlen) | ... |

Key length and value length are 2B, which means their maximum length is 65536.

We assume that keys will never be empty, and values can be empty. An empty value means that the corresponding key has been deleted in the view of other parts of the system. For the block builder and iterator, we just treat empty value as-is.

At the end of the block, we will store the offsets of each entry and the total number of entries. For example, if the first entry is at 0th position of the block, and the second is at 12th position,

|offset|offset|num_of_elements|
|   0  |  12  |       2       |

The footer of the block will be as above. Each of the number is stored as u16.

The block has a size limit, which is target_size. Unless the first key-value pair exceeds the target block size, you should ensure that the encoded block size is always less than or equal to target_size.

The BlockBuilder will produce the data part and unencoded entry offsets when build is called. The information will be stored in the Block struct. As key-value entries are stored in the raw format and offsets are stored in a separate vector, this reduces unnecessary memory allocations and processing overhead when decoding data -- what you need to do is to simply copy the raw block data to the data vector and decode the entry offsets every 2 bytes, instead of creating something like Vec<(Vec<u8>, Vec<u8>)> to store all the key value pairs in one block in memory. This compact memory layout is very efficient. Block::encode and Block::decode will encode to / decode from the data layout illustrated in the above figures.

Task 2 - Block Iterator

Given a block object, we will need to extract the key-value pairs. To do this, we create an iterator over a block and find the information we want.

BlockIterator can be created with an Arc<Block>. If create_and_seek_to_first is called, it will be positioned at the first key in the block. If create_and_seek_to_key is called, the iterator will be positioned at the first key which is >= the provided key. For example, if 1, 3, 5 is in a block,

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let mut iter = BlockIterator::create_and_seek_to_key(block, b"2");
assert_eq!(iter.key(), b"3");
}

seek 2 will make the iterator to be positioned at the next available key of 2, which is 3.

The iterator should copy key and value from the block and store them inside the iterator, so that users can access the key and the value without any extra copy with fn key(&self) -> &[u8], which directly returns the reference of the locally-stored key and value.

When next is called, the iterator will move to the next position. If we reach the end of the block, we can set key to empty and return false from is_valid, so that the caller can switch to another block if possible.

After implementing this part, you should be able to pass all tests in block/tests.rs.

Extra Tasks

Here is a list of extra tasks you can do to make the block encoding more robust and efficient.

Note: Some test cases might not pass after implementing this part. You might need to write your own test cases.

  • Implement block checksum. Verify checksum when decoding the block.
  • Compress / uncompress block. Compress on build and uncompress on decoding.