Magma: A High Data Density Storage Engine Used in Couchbase

Summary: Magma combines LSM trees with segmented logs for Couchbase, using index-free garbage collection during segment compaction to avoid random I/O and whole-file rewrites. It delivers lower write/space amplification, 3.3× higher data density, and 10× lower memory usage. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 13014
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.4594782e-05
Overall Rank: 8,240 | 43.47%
DOI: 10.14778/3554821.3554839

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Sarath Lakshman (Couchbase)
2. Apaar Gupta (Couchbase)
3. Rohan Suri (Couchbase)
4. Scott Lashley (Couchbase)
5. John Liang (Couchbase)
6. Srinath Duvuru (Couchbase)
7. Ravi Mayuram (Couchbase)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lakshman_vldb22,
        title = {{Magma: A High Data Density Storage Engine Used in Couchbase}},
        author = {Lakshman, Sarath and Gupta, Apaar and Suri, Rohan and Lashley, Scott and Liang, John and Duvuru, Srinath and Mayuram, Ravi},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '22},
        volume = {15},
        number = {12},
        pages = {3496--3508},
        doi = {10.14778/3554821.3554839},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3554821.3554839},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,521	BG3: A Cost Effective and I/O Efficient Graph Database in ByteDance	2024	SIGMOD	5.8534756e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,112	Have Your Data and Query It Too: From Key-Value Caching to Big Data Management	2016	SIGMOD	5.9718141e-05
12,063	Nitro: A Fast, Scalable In-Memory Storage Engine for NoSQL Global Secondary Index	2016	VLDB	5.093636e-05

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