
Table Record and Key Format in SQLite
Hello, I'm Maneshwar. I'm working on git-lrc : a Git hook for Checking AI generated code. Yesterday we discussed internal datatypes and how the VM composes values into records. Today we look at what those records actually look like on disk. When SQLite stores a row inside a table B+-tree, it does not write columns one by one in some naive layout. It constructs a carefully structured byte sequence. Table Record Format A table record (row data) consists of two logical parts: Header Record Image (Data Section) The header begins with a size field . This value tells us how many bytes exist before the first data item ( Data1 ). Importantly, this size includes the bytes used to encode the size field itself. The size is stored as a variable-length 64-bit integer using SQLite’s varint encoding (a Huffman-style compact representation). In effect, the size field acts as a pointer to where the actual data begins. After the size field, the header contains one type field per column , in the same ord
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