I want to create a MVCCKey with a timestamp and pretty value I know. But I realize a roachpb.key is not very straightforward; is there some prefix/suffix involved? Is the database name is also encoded in roachpb.key?
Can anyone please tell me how a MVCCKey is formed? What information does it have? In the documentation, it just says that it looks like /table/primary/key/column.
An engine.MVCCKey combines a regular key with a timestamp. MVCCKeys are encoded into byte strings for use as RockDB keys (RocksDB is configured with a custom comparator so MVCCKeys are sorted correctly even though the timestamp uses a variable-width encoding).
Regular keys are byte strings of type roachpb.Key. For ordinary data records, the keys are constructed from table, column, and index IDs, along with the values of indexed columns. (The database ID is not included here; the database to which a table belongs can be found in the system.descriptors table)
The function keys.PrettyPrint can convert a roachpb.Key to a human-readable form.