Not necessarily. Take a look at this implementation https://aosabook.org/en/500L/an-archaeology-inspired-database.html https://aosabook.org/en/500L/an-archaeolo

Not necessarily. Take a look at this implementation https://aosabook.org/en/500L/an-archaeology-inspired-database.html https://aosabook.org/en/500L/an-archaeology-inspired-databas... There you can only retrieve the top layer and don't have to scan all historic data, it's only in-memory though.