The document provides an overview of data structures and algorithms used by database storage engines, focusing on the selection criteria for different databases based on data structure, scalability, and developer familiarity. It details various types of storage engines, particularly the log-structured merge tree (LSM tree), which is optimized for sequential writes and includes components like memtable, in-memory index, and SSTable. Additionally, it discusses the handling of updates and deletes in LSM tree architecture.