LevelDB is an open-source on-disk key-value store written by Google fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

[2][3] Inspired by Bigtable,[4] LevelDB source code is hosted on GitHub under the New BSD License and has been ported to a variety of Unix-based systems, macOS, Windows, and Android.

They wrote LevelDB starting in early 2011, with the same general design as the Bigtable tablet stack, but not sharing any of the code.

Google has provided benchmarks comparing LevelDB's performance to SQLite and Kyoto Cabinet in different scenarios.

[12] Updated benchmarks[13] show that LevelDB also outperforms Berkeley DB, but these tests also show that OpenLDAP LightningDB is much faster (~10 times in some scenarios) in read operations and some write types (e.g. batch and synchronous writes, see the link above), and is almost equal in the rest of the test.