RustConf 2018 - Project Mentat: a store for evolving data in Rust Delivered by Grisha Kruglov
Channel: Rust
Date: 06/09/2018

RustConf 2018 - Project Mentat: a store for evolving data in Rust Delivered by Grisha Kruglov
Prepared by Emily Toop

Mozilla has a data storage problem. There is no unified strategy for storing new user data and moving it between devices, which has led to a proliferation of stores and strategies and a fragile mechanism for syncing that only handles a subset of data collected. Project Mentat was born to help resolve these issues - a structured data store that is designed to be replicated and synchronized and written in Rust to ensure security, safety and maximum portability between platforms.

This talk is about why we decided to "build" rather than "buy", how Mentat is designed to address the problems and requirements associated with data storage and syncing in an environment with trong client-side encryption, - as well as the challenges encountered and lessons learned while using Rust to create portable, performant, persistent, syncing, structured data storage.