# RocksDB

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/rocksdb/

17 people recommended RocksDB in Hacker News comments, 3 had mixed feelings and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 12 months, in 15 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Embedded key-value store people recommend for large-scale, high-throughput workloads, with good results in past projects. Critics report data loss and corruption, and say benchmarks depend heavily on configuration.

Summary written by Claude from 21 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles large scale well (4 comments in the sample): "RocksDB was 177x faster on writes and used 26,000x less memory during batch operations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46082639)) "Production adoption at scale is always relevant as a measure of stability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338857)) "it just is miles better than other databases when I needed large scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782011))
- Good results in past projects (3 comments in the sample): "rocksdb has been the closest thing to what I want for this workload that I've found" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46500937)) "I’ve used RocksDB for this kind of thing in the past with good results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333900)) "all of them have worked better for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932344))

## What people warn about

- Reports of data loss and corruption (4 comments in the sample): "It can lose recent acknowledged writes after power loss, much like TurboKV Durable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500941)) "It was regularly having corruption issues when doing development with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47781082)) "RocksDB's amazing ability to corrupt and lose data frequently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740904))

## Other key-value stores people recommend

- [LMDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lmdb/): 17 recommend, 5 mixed, 12 criticize
- [Cloudflare KV](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-kv/): 8 recommend, 0 mixed, 12 criticize

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "RocksDB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rocksdb/ (17 recommend, 3 mixed, 3 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.