Quite a few databases lately are using RocksDB as their backend. Really, relational databases are just a key-value store with a well-optimized query planner on

Quite a few databases lately are using RocksDB as their backend. Really, relational databases are just a key-value store with a well-optimized query planner on top of it. See: -CockroachDB (a spinoff of Google's Spanner) -MySQL's MyRocks (Facebook) -YugaByte (Postgres compatible sharded SQL) -Ceph (Opensource alternative to Amazon S3) I am guessing this is looking into improving the performance even further.