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Database Layout

Aleth uses three databases, all of them are essentially just key-value storages (MemoryDB, LevelDB, or RocksDB is used depending on the runtime settings). Their physical disk locations are as follows (note that this doesn't apply to MemoryDB):

  • Blocks - {ETH_DATABASE_DIR}/{GENESIS_HASH}/blocks
  • Extras -{ETH_DATABASE_DIR}/{GENESIS_HASH}/{DATABASE_VERSION}/extras
  • State -{ETH_DATABASE_DIR}/{GENESIS_HASH}/{DATABASE_VERSION}/state

where

{ETH_DATABASE_DIR} - base Aleth database directory {GENESIS_HASH} - hex representation of first 4 bytes of genesis block hash (d4e56740 for main net, 41941023 for Ropsten) {DATABASE_VERSION} - encoded current version of the database layout (12041 as of the time of this writing)

Blocks

The blockchain storage, the only thing stored here is binary (RLP-encoded) data of the blocks.

Every record is:

blockHash => blockData

Low-level access to both Blocks and Extras databases is encapsulated in BlockChain class.

Extras

Additional data to support efficient queries to the blockchain data.

To distinguish between the types of records, a byte-long constant is concatenated to the keys. + in the following description means this concatenation.

  • For each block stored in Blocks DB, Extras has the following records:
blockHash + ExtraDetails => rlp(number, totalDiffiulty, parentHash, rlp(childrenHashes)) // ExtraDetails = 0
blockHash + ExtraLogBlooms => rlp(blockLogBlooms) // ExtraLogBlooms = 3
blockHash + ExtraReceipts => rlp(receipts) // ExtraReceipts = 4
blockNumber + ExtraBlockHash => blockHash // ExtraBlockHash = 1

  • For each transaction in the blockchain Extras has the following records:

    transactionHash + ExtraTransactionAddress => rlp(blockHash, transactionIndex) // ExtraTransactionAddress = 2

  • Records storing log blooms for a number of blocks at once have the form:

    chunkId + ExtraBlocksBlooms => blooms // ExtraBlocksBlooms = 5

    where chunkId = index * 255 + level. See comment to BlockChain::blocksBlooms() method for details.

  • Additional records, one instance of each:

    "best" => lastBlockHash // best block of the canonical chain
"chainStart" => firstBlockHash // used when we don't have the full chain, for example after snapshot import

State

The data representing the full Ethereum state (i.e. all the accounts). The State data forms a Merkle Patricia Trie and the database stores the nodes of this trie.

  • Nodes of the trie for the mapping sha3(address) => accountData, where according to Yellow Paper accountData = rlp(nonce, balance, storageRoot, codeHash).
  • For each account with non-empty storage there is a storage trie with nodes for the mapping sha3(key) => value.
  • For each account with non-empty code, it is stored separately out of the tries: sha3(code) => code.
  • For each key of all the tries above the mapping of sha3 hash to its preimage (address or storage key) is stored: hash + 255 => preimage (+ is concatenation).

For the code managing the state see State class (also note free function commit there). Merkle Patricia Trie implemenation is in TrieDB.h. For lower-level code accessing the database itself see OverlayDB and StateCacheDB <https://github.com/ethereum/aleth/blob/master/libdevcore/StateCacheB.h>`__.