compaction

How to manage, compress, and strategically fill the context window in long-horizon agents — covering summarization checkpoints, scratchpad memory, retrieval injection, prompt caching, and compaction triggers.

B-trees rule read-heavy OLTP; LSM-trees rule write-heavy workloads. Learn how the memtable and immutable SSTable pipeline converts random writes into sequential I/O, why compaction is unavoidable, how bloom filters slash unnecessary reads, and when to pick LSM over B-tree.