The Kid Who Broke His Computer
When I was in grade 1, I broke my mom's computer by — from what I remember — moving the mouse too fast in MS Paint. She was very skeptical of giving me any kind of PC after that. PCs used to be expensive, and I grew up in a lower middle class family.
My school had computers, but I was always the one with the least fluency — no PC in my day-to-day life. I kept asking my parents for one. After 4 years of begging, they finally gave in.
I got my first computer in 5th grade. My parents surprised me back in 2010 — they could barely afford it, but they made it happen. The first thought that came to my mind? Finally I can play games. I was no longer the outcast among my friends who knew what "RAM" was, how to install a game, what Windows is.
As a kid who was average in everything, I started borrowing game CDs from friends. One day while installing HULK, I thought I broke my machine. The computer I kept constantly asking my parents for — the one they could barely afford — broken in under a month?
I felt terrible. I started doing the only thing I knew: turning it off and on again. Every restart would flash "Press F1 to see boot options." I never caught it the first time. But after restarting my machine almost 500 times, I finally read what it said.
I pressed F1, saw the options, and realized the game CD was selected as the boot device. All I had to do was switch it back to the hard disk drive where Windows was installed. And voila — I fixed my computer.
I gave up on HULK and moved on to the hot game of the time — GTA San Andreas. I heard installing it was tough. My friends described the process so dramatically I almost didn't try. But I went for it anyway.
That was the first time I saw DLL errors. I had no regular internet access — the only thing with a connection was my mom's Nokia 7230 with a 2G data plan. I searched for the exact DLL error on that tiny screen and found an article with a download link for the missing file.
I downloaded it onto my mom's phone, moved it through a dongle and a memory card over to my machine, copied it into System32, and restarted the installation. Voila — another DLL error. But this time, I knew what to do.
In about two weeks, without any adult supervision, I managed to install the game. I started getting popular among my friends. I was the one who could tame this scary machine that everyone was afraid to break.
Then came installing Windows. One day, the technician who upgraded my PC from Windows XP to Vista forgot his bootable CD. I knew what to do — worst case, he's coming back for his CD anyway, he might as well fix a broken OS install.
I pressed F1, selected the CD, and started the installation. Installed it under D: instead of C:. I immediately started fresh — I knew where I went wrong. And just like that, I learned how to install Windows without breaking the computer. I was in 7th standard and on cloud nine. Forget Rockstar Games — I AM the rockstar.
From Rockstar to Lost
Soon I was the computer guy among my friends and family. But the shallow knowledge started to feel hollow — I wanted to learn more. How do computers actually work? What are programming languages?
I connected my mom's phone to the computer through Nokia PC Suite and got the internet working. I searched for programming tutorials, found Python, and started learning through Codecademy.
Fast forward to 2019. During my Bachelor's, I launched my first startup — a social media app that now has over 400K downloads. For a kid from a lower middle class family, what that app gave me felt like a dream. It funded my Master's degree in Canada, paid my rent, and opened doors I never thought I'd walk through. This machine that I once broke in grade 1 had quietly changed the trajectory of my life.
Under the hood, I used Firestore and SQLite. Firestore handled most of the scaling seamlessly — change data capture, realtime snapshots, all taken care of. But I was always under the pressure of shipping code. When you're the only one handling that volume of traffic, there's always something to do.
And somewhere in that rush, I lost my compass.
I stopped diving deep into the things I was curious about. I forgot why I got into computer science in the first place. Was it all about shipping products? Or was there a part of me that was deeply into the art of computer science itself?
Then the kid inside me started speaking up. This is not how we play. I don't see DLL errors anymore. Everything is sorted. I want to go back to basics.
What Is a Database, Actually?
That kid who restarted his computer 500 times to read a boot message, who hunted for DLL files on a Nokia with 2G — he didn't care about shipping. He was curious. He wanted to understand how things work.
So I asked myself: I've used databases my entire career — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB — but do I actually understand what happens after SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1? How does it find that row so fast among millions? Where does it live on disk? What happens if the power goes out mid-write?
I decided to find out. Not by reading docs. By building one.
Not a toy key-value store. Not a wrapper around SQLite. A real relational database management system — with B-Tree indexes, disk persistence, a buffer pool, a type system, and a SQL parser. I'm calling it gatidb.
The Plan
I'm using MySQL's InnoDB storage engine as my reference — I literally cloned the MySQL source code and I'm reading their C++ implementation alongside building mine in Rust.
Here's what a real database needs:
- B-Tree Engine — The core data structure that powers lookups in O(log n) time
- Disk Persistence — A page-based storage layer so data survives restarts
- Buffer Pool — An in-memory cache so we're not hitting disk on every read
- Table & Schema Layer — Data types, row encoding, column definitions
- System Catalog — A data dictionary that tracks all tables and their metadata
- SQL Parser — So you can type real SQL instead of Rust code
- Write-Ahead Log — Crash recovery, like InnoDB's redo log
- Joins & Query Planning — Multi-table queries
Each one gets its own post. I'll explain what the component does, why it's needed, how I built it in Rust, and how MySQL does the same thing — with references to the actual InnoDB source code.
Next Up
In Part 2, I'll dive into the foundation of every database index: the B-Tree. Why databases don't use hash maps, how binary search makes lookups fast, and how gatidb benchmarks against MySQL.
See you there.