The company has posted the code for the database on Github, in hopes that others, both in industry and the academic community, will refine the software. With Facebook’s emphasis on scalability, RocksDB may be of interest to other Internet services and enterprises that are building high-traffic apps for customers and employees.
In its newfound liberation, RocksDB joins other software that Facebook has released as open source. Facebook has posted the source code this year for the HipHop PHP virtual machine, the Presto query engine, the Flashcache caching software, and the Corona Hadoop scheduler, all of which were developed in-house.