The approximate size APIs allow a user to get a reasonably accurate guess of disk space and memory utilization of a key range.

API Usage

The main APIs are GetApproximateSizes() and GetApproximateMemTableStats(). The former takes a struct SizeApproximationOptions as an argument. It has the following fields -

  • include_memtabtles - Indicates whether to count the memory usage of a given key range in memtables towards the overall size of the key range.
  • include_files - Indicates whether to count the size of SST files occupied by the key range towards the overall size. Atleast one of this or include_memtabtles must be set to true.
  • files_size_error_margin - This option indicates the acceptable ratio of over/under estimation of file size to the actual file size. For example, a value of 0.1 means the approximate size will be within 10% of the actual size of the key range. The main purpose of this option is to make the calculation more efficient. Setting this to -1.0 will force RocksDB to seek into SST files to accurately calculate the size, which will be more CPU intensive.Example,
  std::array<Range, NUM_RANGES> ranges;  std::array<uint64_t, NUM_RANGES> sizes;  SizeApproximationOptions options;   options.include_memtabtles = true;  options.files_size_error_margin = 0.1;   ranges[0].start = start_key1;  ranges[0].limit = end_key1;  ranges[1].start = start_key2;  ranges[1].limit = end_key2;   Status s = GetApproximateSizes(options, column_family, ranges.data(), NUM_RANGES, sizes.data());  // sizes[0] and sizes[1] contain the size in bytes for the respective ranges

The API counterpart for memtable usage is GetApproximateMemTableStats, which returns the number of entries and total size of a given key range. Example,

  Range range;  uint64_t count;  uint64_t size;   range.start = start_key;  range.limit = end_key;   Status s = GetApproximateMemTableStats(column_family, range, &count, &size);

The GetApproximateMemTableStats is only supported for memtables created by SkipListFactory.

Note that the approximate size from SST files are size of compressed blocks. It might be significantly smaller than the actual key/value size.