Wrote an essay on Bloom filters, but not what you would expect

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Dec 29, 2025 • 1 min read


Wrote an essay on Bloom filters, but not what you would expect.

The essay not only covers what Bloom filters are and how they work, but also the math behind false positives, size estimation, the role of hash functions, and how variants like counting and deletable Bloom filters extend the core idea.

I also covered some interesting real-world benchmarks and numbers to consider when choosing Bloom filters, and when these trade-offs actually pay off.

More importantly, I covered real-world, no-fluff use cases of Bloom filters in database query acceleration. Give it a read.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses