GitHub's Data Model: How to Store Version History in a Database
Modelling version control in a database the way Git does: content-addressable blobs, trees and commits as a Merkle DAG, structural sharing of unchanged files, and the two-table schema that backs it.
Somewhere on your machine there's a folder like this: report.docx, report_v2.docx, report_final.docx, report_final_ACTUAL.docx, report_final_use_this_one.docx. You built a version-control system by hand, and it's terrible — five near-identical copies, no idea what changed between any two, and a fixed typo in paragraph one duplicated across all five. Now imagine that folder holding every version of every file in a codebase, across a hundred thousand commits. Save a full copy each time and you store the same unchanged README a hundred thousand times; the store grows as (files × commits) and quie…
What’s inside
Read this one free
Sign in and your first premium article is on us — read GitHub's Data Model: How to Store Version History in a Database free.