MTDB: an LSM-tree-based key-value store using a multi-tree structure to improve read performance

Traditional LSM-tree-based key-value storage systems face significant read amplification issues due to the multi-level structure of LSM-tree, the unordered SSTable files in Level 0, and the lack of an in-memory index structure for key-value pairs. We observed that, under the influence of workloads with locality features, key-value pairs exhibit a range-specific access intensity. Addressing the three reasons for LSM-tree read amplification, we have utilized the range-specific access intensity of workload to propose a multi-tree structure consisting of a B+ tree, a single-level hot tree, and an LSM-tree with partition-based Level 0. This aims to enhance the read performance of LSM-tree-based key-value storage systems. We designed the prototype, MTDB, based on LevelDB. The experimental results show that MTDB’s read performance is 1.62× to 2.02× that of LevelDB, and it approaches or exceeds the read performance of KVell and Bourbon while reducing memory overhead by 58.85%–86%.