Merge pull request #445 from benbjohnson/reading

README: Add 'Reading the Source' section

1 files changed, 50 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 0a33ebc..6babdd3 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -633,6 +633,56 @@ Here are a few things to note when evaluating and using Bolt:
 [page-allocation]: https://github.com/boltdb/bolt/issues/308#issuecomment-74811638
 
 
+## Reading the Source
+
+Bolt is a relatively small code base (<3KLOC) for an embedded, serializable,
+transactional key/value database so it can be a good starting point for people
+interested in how databases work.
+
+The best places to start are the main entry points into Bolt:
+
+- `Open()` - Initializes the reference to the database. It's responsible for
+  creating the database if it doesn't exist, obtaining an exclusive lock on the
+  file, reading the meta pages, & memory-mapping the file.
+
+- `DB.Begin()` - Starts a read-only or read-write transaction depending on the
+  value of the `writable` argument. This requires briefly obtaining the "meta"
+  lock to keep track of open transactions. Only one read-write transaction can
+  exist at a time so the "rwlock" is acquired during the life of a read-write
+  transaction.
+
+- `Bucket.Put()` - Writes a key/value pair into a bucket. After validating the
+  arguments, a cursor is used to traverse the B+tree to the page and position
+  where they key & value will be written. Once the position is found, the bucket
+  materializes the underlying page and the page's parent pages into memory as
+  "nodes". These nodes are where mutations occur during read-write transactions.
+  These changes get flushed to disk during commit.
+
+- `Bucket.Get()` - Retrieves a key/value pair from a bucket. This uses a cursor
+  to move to the page & position of a key/value pair. During a read-only
+  transaction, the key and value data is returned as a direct reference to the
+  underlying mmap file so there's no allocation overhead. For read-write
+  transactions, this data may reference the mmap file or one of the in-memory
+  node values.
+
+- `Cursor` - This object is simply for traversing the B+tree of on-disk pages
+  or in-memory nodes. It can seek to a specific key, move to the first or last
+  value, or it can move forward or backward. The cursor handles the movement up
+  and down the B+tree transparently to the end user.
+
+- `Tx.Commit()` - Converts the in-memory dirty nodes and the list of free pages
+  into pages to be written to disk. Writing to disk then occurs in two phases.
+  First, the dirty pages are written to disk and an `fsync()` occurs. Second, a
+  new meta page with an incremented transaction ID is written and another
+  `fsync()` occurs. This two phase write ensures that partially written data
+  pages are ignored in the event of a crash since the meta page pointing to them
+  is never written. Partially written meta pages are invalidated because they
+  are written with a checksum.
+
+If you have additional notes that could be helpful for others, please submit
+them via pull request.
+
+
 ## Other Projects Using Bolt
 
 Below is a list of public, open source projects that use Bolt: