RocksDB
Hacker ApprovedTied for most recommended of 6 key-value stores
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.
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.
24 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 20
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 83%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 20 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Handles large scale well
“RocksDB was 177x faster on writes and used 26,000x less memory during batch operations.”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “Building a Distributed Database in Elixir, Part 3: Storage Layer and Why RocksDB” “Production adoption at scale is always relevant as a measure of stability”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?” “it just is miles better than other databases when I needed large scale”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “B-trees and database indexes (2024)” - Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters”
Good results in past projects
“rocksdb has been the closest thing to what I want for this workload that I've found”
Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “Databases in 2025: A Year in Review” “I've used RocksDB for this kind of thing in the past with good results.”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters” “all of them have worked better for me”
Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Volume 1) Berkeley DB”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Reports of data loss and corruption
“It can lose recent acknowledged writes after power loss, much like TurboKV Durable.”
Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store” “It was regularly having corruption issues when doing development with it.”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “Do You Even Need a Database?” “RocksDB's amazing ability to corrupt and lose data frequently”
Comment from 1 Jul 2026 in “CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3” - Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3”
Other key-value stores people recommend
The four most recommended other key-value stores, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RocksDBThis page | 20 | 4 | 83% | 8 | — | Approved |
| LMDB | 20 | 9 | 69% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Cloudflare KV | 9 | 12 | 43% | 8 | — | — |
| etcd | 9 | 23 | 28% | 4 | — | — |
| LevelDB | 5 | 5 | 50% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
21 of the 27 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I never see any of these get the props they deserve”
“It can lose recent acknowledged writes after power loss, much like TurboKV Durable.”
“major OSS projects have all/most important data structures and algorithms implemented and described way better”
“I use a in-memory database per unit test with both rocksdb and sqlite”
“Next step is go down one more level to ditch SQL and learn LMDB and/or RocksDB.”
“still faces unrecoverable data loss because of RocksDB”
“RocksDB's amazing ability to corrupt and lose data frequently”
“it just is miles better than other databases when I needed large scale”
“It was regularly having corruption issues when doing development with it.”
“second one is more comprehensive”
“none of those other choices actually do what I wanted without quite a bit of pain”
“Frankly, RocksDB, SQLite or Postgres would be easy choices for that.”
“all of them have worked better for me”
“say Guava data structures or RocksDb core - yup I'll invest the time to learn”
“rocksdb has been the closest thing to what I want for this workload that I've found”
“Production adoption at scale is always relevant as a measure of stability”
“I've used RocksDB for this kind of thing in the past with good results.”
“Used in high throughput systems like Ceph OSDs.”
“RocksDB is incredibly powerful with proper setup and key schemas”
“RocksDB was 177x faster on writes and used 26,000x less memory during batch operations.”
“The benchmark for rocks DB is also questionable as the performance depends a lot on how you configure it”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.