spotify/sparkey

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1208 stars · 83 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Sparkey is a simple constant key/value storage library written in C, essentially a read-only hash table on disk optimized for read-heavy systems with infrequent large bulk inserts. It ships as a C library (libsparkey) plus a command-line utility for inspecting and reading sparkey index/log files.

Use cases

• store a large immutable key/value dataset on disk for fast random reads
• periodically rebuild a lookup table with bulk writes and serve it read-only
• embed a persistent hashtable in a C application without running a database server
• inspect and read sparkey index/log files from the command line
• serve rarely-updated reference data to high-throughput low-latency services

When to choose

• your data is written in infrequent large bulk loads and read far more often than updated
• you want a lightweight embedded key/value store with no server or network layer
• you need many concurrent readers with low per-entry overhead and block compression

When to avoid

• you need frequent incremental writes or multiple concurrent writers
• you need a distributed or replicated key/value store
• you need robustness against data corruption or a compacted data store

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

database caching serialization databases developer-tools performance cpp cli cross-platform key-value-store persistent-hashtable read-heavy bulk-inserts snappy-compression c-library linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="spotify/sparkey")