Drehtable

Drehtable is a conceptual data structure and software library designed to manage tabular data in memory with emphasis on speed, simplicity, and predictable performance. It provides a lightweight interface for creating, updating, and querying tables where each row represents a record and each column holds a value of a uniform type across rows. The design aims to balance the flexibility of a spreadsheet with the efficiency of a database.

Architecture and features: Drehtable uses a columnar layout for analytics-friendly access and a row-oriented layout for transactional workloads, selectable at runtime. It partitions data into small shards based on a configurable key, enabling locality of reference and parallel processing. The API exposes operations such as insert, delete, update, and a subset of SQL-like queries, including selection, projection, filtering, and simple aggregations. It emphasizes deterministic memory usage and low latency for common operations.

Implementation notes: Drehtable implementations typically provide in-memory storage with optional on-disk persistence, pluggable index structures (hash-based or tree-based), and a minimal query planner. It is designed to be embedded in software projects or educational experiments rather than as a full-fledged database system. It often targets environments where predictable performance and low overhead are prioritized over wide-ranging scalability.

Applications: Use cases include rapid prototyping of data-centric applications, in-memory analytics on moderate datasets, and teaching concepts of table-oriented data management.

Limitations: Not intended as a fault-tolerant, highly scalable database; capacity and durability depend on the specific implementation and deployment.