My databases class at UCLA wasn’t very challenging so I never truly understood the internals of databases. This always bothered me so I vowed to build a simple database from scratch to learn the fundamentals. MIT’s Database Systems course has their students implement a simple database from scratch and it provided me the perfect guidance in achieving my goal. The SimpleDB database I built has basic RDBMS features like a SQL query parser, transactions, and a query optimizer. This blog post provides an outline of SimpleDB’s architecture and implementation.