June 25, 2026 • By Brian Marete
When designing RowKeyDB, we knew that a high-performance, Bigtable-compatible API shouldn’t just be restricted to durable storage. Many modern infrastructure challenges require the rich semantics of wide-column stores, but strictly for volatile, low-latency data.
That is why RowKeyDB ships with a native, memory-only backend. Simply pass --storage_backend=memory at startup, and your instance is ready.
It is common for databases to offer an in-memory mode that acts merely as a development crutch. We took a different path. The RowKeyDB memory backend is subjected to the same rigorous correctness tests as our durable engine. It supports the exact same Bigtable API. If your application works against the memory backend, it will work against the durable backend—and vice versa.