Bitcask is an Erlang application that provides an API for storing and retrieving key/value data into a log-structured hash table that provides very fast access. The design owes a lot to the principles found in log-structured file systems and draws inspiration from a number of designs that involve log file merging.

Strengths
Low latency per item read or written
This is due to the write-once, append-only nature of the Bitcask database files. High throughput, especially when writing an incoming stream of random items Because the data being written doesn't need to be ordered on disk and because the log structured design allows for minimal disk head movement during writes these operations generally saturate the I/O and disk bandwidth.

Ability to handle datasets larger than RAM w/o degradation
Because access to data in Bitcask is direct lookup from an in-memory hash table finding data on disk is very efficient, even when data sets are very large.

Single Seek to Retrieve Any Value
Bitcask's in-memory hash-table of keys point directly to locations on disk where the data lives. Bitcask never uses more than one disk seek to read a value and sometimes, due to file-system caching done by the operating system, even that isn't necessary.

Predictable Lookup and Insert Performance
As you might expect from the description above, read operations have a fixed, predictable behavior. What you might not expect is that this is also true for writes. Write operations are at most a seek to the end of the current file open writing and an append to that file.

Fast, bounded Crash Recovery
Due to the append-only write once nature of Bitcask files, recovery is easy and fast. The only items that might be lost are partially written records at the tail of the file last opened for writes. Recovery need only review the last record or two written and verify CRC data to ensure that the data is consistent.

Easy Backup
In most systems backup can be very complicated but here again Bitcask simplifies this process due to its append-only write once disk format. Any utility that archives or copies files in disk-block order will properly backup or copy a Bitcask database.

Weakness
Keys Must Fit In Memory
Bitcask keeps all keys in memory at all times, this means that your system must have enough memory to contain your entire keyspace with room for other operational components and operating system resident filesystem buffer space.