striking already mentioned mdb, and I will mention kdb+<p>I&#x27;m not sure what those pains are that you are talking about. mmap allows use to share buffers with the OS in a way that is much more efficient than you can do with plain reads; it costs you some asynchrony and (practically these days) the ability to use a 32-bit processor.<p>Other than that, it is the same - you still have to reason about locality of reference and stuff.