About

What this is

datahall is a small static site that walks through the internals of 25 production databases. The goal is to make storage engines, transaction models, and index structures approachable for engineers who use these systems every day but rarely read their source.

What it is not

• It is not a benchmark. We don't run queries, we describe how they run.
• It is not a tutorial. We assume you can read SQL or vector-search code.
• It is not exhaustive. We pick one or two subsystems per database and go deep.

How it's built

Astro 7 for the static site, Tailwind v4 for the dark-mode UI, plain TypeScript modules for the exhibit data, and Zod for runtime validation. Diagrams are hand-authored SVG with CSS keyframes for animation. The same exhibit data is intended to power a future TUI consumer.

Contributing

The source is at https://github.com/kleinpanic/datahall. Adding an exhibit means adding one TypeScript file undersrc/data/exhibits/and validating it against the schema with pnpm run test:unit.