The present invention provides a system and method for maintaining checkpoints of a keyed
data structure using a sequential log. The mechanisms of the present invention are built
upon the idea of writing all updates to a keyed data structure in a physically sequential
location. The mechanisms of the present invention make use of a two-stage operation. In a
first stage which takes place in main memory between writes to persistent storage, various
values of the same key are combined such that only the latest value in a given checkpoint …