Badger vs. RocksDB

Badger is different from other LSM tree based DBs in that it colocates only small values or pointers along with these keys, storing the values separately in a value log. Badger can push a lot of keys into a single SSTable, whatever the size of values might be, because only small values or value pointers are stored in LSM tree. This quick RAM access to the LSM tree allows Badger to provide an option to iterate over the keys very quickly ( ), and get a bunch of unique information about the values without fetching them: value identification bits, size of the value, expiry time and and so on.

Source: blog.dgraph.io