Both of them, really. There's a lot to know if you want to build a modern database system. But no work I am aware of addresses the specific question of how to b

Both of them, really. There's a lot to know if you want to build a modern database system. But no work I am aware of addresses the specific question of how to build a database system from scratch. A reasonable approach might be to start with this high-level paper, and follow papers they reference until they get specific enough to address your specific questions: Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker, James Hamilton. Architecture of a Database System. Foundations and Trends in Databases, 1, 2 (2007). For the sort of low-level issues that you are interested in, it might be useful to study a well-regarded persistence package, such as Berkeley DB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB Another system that might be worth studying is SQLite. https://www.sqlite.org/index.html https://www.sqlite.org/index.html