LSM Trees: Why Your Database Writes Are Fast and Your Reads Are Lying to You

TL;DR: The thing that broke my comfortable ignorance about storage engines was a pipeline ingesting sensor telemetry — about 50,000 inserts per second into a PostgreSQL 15 cluster. The hardware wasn't cheap: NVMe drives, 32 cores, 128GB RAM. 📖 Reading time: ~42 min The Problem That Made Me Actuall