It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit multi-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound workloads.

[10] This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.

Like other NoSQL and dbm stores, it has no relational data model, and it does not support SQL queries.

Also, it has no direct support for secondary indexes, however a user may build their own internally using Column Families or externally.

RocksDB was created at Facebook by Dhruba Borthakur[27][28] in April 2012, as a fork of LevelDB with the initial stated goal of improving performance for server workloads.

[citation needed] The Instagram team at Facebook developed and open-sourced their code, along with benchmarks of their performance results.

[37][38][39] A related program is Rocks Strata, a tool written in Go, which allows managing incremental backups of MongoDB when RocksDB is used as the storage engine.

It represents a shared abstraction for create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations common to every storage engine.