keys

pkg/keys/ defines CockroachDB's canonical keyspace layout. Everything that lives in the KV map — system tables, range descriptors, locks, raft logs, time series — has a constant or constructor here.

High-level layout

\x00 ... local keys (per-replica state, raft log, range descriptor)
\x01 ... system tenant data (ranges, descriptors, ...)
\x02 ... range descriptors (meta1, meta2)
\x03 ... system tenant SQL data
\xfe ... tenant prefix: \xfe<tenantID>...

The full layout is documented inline in pkg/keys/constants.go and pkg/keys/printer.go.

What's in the package

• constants.go — every reserved key prefix.
• keys.go — constructors (e.g. MakeRangeKey, MakeRangeDescriptorKey, LocalRangeAppliedStateKey).
• addressing.go — the meta-range addressing scheme.
• printer.go — pretty-printing for debug output.
• version.go — version-key handling.
• system.go — system-tenant key constructors.
• keysbase/ — small subset reused by tools that can't import the rest.

Why this matters

Every key lookup, range bound, and admin tool implicitly assumes the layout in this package. Adding a new top-level prefix is rare and requires a cluster-version gate plus careful migration; it is much more common to extend an existing prefix (e.g., a new system table ID).

Related pages

• Storage / MVCC — how keys are encoded.
• KV server — keys.LocalRangeAppliedStateKey and friends are central.
• packages/roachpb — RangeDescriptor keys are produced here.