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Experiences, Thoughts & Reviews

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12 Nov 2025

Aerospike: My 'Aha!' moments - The predictable Primary Index

A women software programmer wonder by looking at the smart aerospike client looking like bot talking to servers Aerospike builds primary index using distributed hashmap and red-black tree(sprigs). This method supports them to maintain the predictable low latency. For each record in the namespace, it creates a 20 byte hash (RIPEMD-160 hash) which helps identifying it’s partition and storage location of where the record is stored. So Aerospike can directly reach the record and fetch it with predictable latency.

11 Nov 2025

Aerospike: My 'Aha!' moments - Is your key too hot?

Software professional trying to hold aerospike logo shaped hot key It is quite common that one record is being read/written by more than one client at the same time, especially when you have denormalized data models. In most of the DBs this impacts the latency & some time the request may even timeout. But in Aerospike, if there are too many concurrent operations on the same record, Aerospike will throw “Error Code 14: AS_ERR_KEY_BUSY” error. I presume that this is their fail fast mechanism to avoid performance degradation due to lock contentions.