Avoiding reads in write-optimized index structures

This is a summary of features that avoid storage read IO in OSS write-optimized index structures. My scope is limited to MySQL and Tarantool -- I know there are similar features in other DBMS and am happy for comments on that:

• RocksDB merge operator logically does read-modify-write but physically does a Put into the memtable and the read is deferred until user queries or compaction. I hope that MyRocks eventually takes advantage of the merge operator.
• Read free replication in TokuDB and MyRocks.
• Fast Updates in TokuDB do something similar to the merge operator for update and insert
• Non-unique secondary index maintenance is read free in MyRocks
• Deferred secondary index update in Tarantool is a new approach to avoiding reads for write-heavy workloads. It is worth reading. I wish it had been published by VLDB.
• MyRocks also avoids some storage reads when validating unique constraints (for PK and unique secondary indexes) on inserts and some updates because the Get() that it does can use a bloom filter. This benefit is larger when there is a bloom filter on the max level of the LSM tree, but that has other costs is is frequently not done.
• MyRocks uses the SingleDelete feature in RocksDB to allow tombstones to be removed earlier which decreases the CPU overhead for reads after a batch of writes.
• A b-tree can also reduce index maintenance related storage read IO. See the InnoDB change buffer.

Updates

An incomplete list of relevant research:

• DiffIndex - this is more about distributed systems, but still interesting
• Techniques for reducing index maintenance overhead in an LSM by Luo & Carey (VLDB 2019)
• Deferred Lightweight Indexing (DELI)