I think if you really wanted to get comfortable with something that could have you make a performant, database quickly, you might want to start with something like C...
Now, C is a shotgun that you will invariably use to shoot yourself in the foot with, but I think it's absolutely straightforward and powerful manual memory management, as well as raw speed, would make it worth learning.
Like, you could for example just focus on building a database of a given size, in memory -- you could even do it all in RAM, if you wanted.
You could have the database specialize in holding one kind of data structure (for example, how about tries? they're pretty rare, despite how useful they are)
Thanks for the constructive feedback. In fact, I wanted to focus just in latitude-longitude pairs to perform geolocated queries, this is my single goal. I'm trying to get rid of MongoDB for my backend and this is one of the last barriers...
So you were trying to get rid of mongodb as a backend, and you ended up at writing your own? Well I'm not sure how set you are on that, but maybe you should look into some other databases, what did you dislike about mongo?
And yeah, with such a specific goal, you could very well make a very nice niche DB that optimizes for the kind of data you're trying to search! Especially with map data becoming more and more important, I think it's actually a pretty awesome idea.
However, I would say that you should go in with the intent to make a kickass latitude-longitude database, rather than just having it be a piece of something you're trying to push to production (you have better things to worry about with something that's going to production -- don't make the db one of them)
You never know, you might find that the database is the more important project!
Now, C is a shotgun that you will invariably use to shoot yourself in the foot with, but I think it's absolutely straightforward and powerful manual memory management, as well as raw speed, would make it worth learning.
Like, you could for example just focus on building a database of a given size, in memory -- you could even do it all in RAM, if you wanted.
You could have the database specialize in holding one kind of data structure (for example, how about tries? they're pretty rare, despite how useful they are)