SSTables have had a very significant impact on how many other databases have been developed. LevelDB was their first public appearance (I believe).
It's also nice to recognize the work of people who have had a significant impact on the industry. Jeff Dean & Sanjay Ghemawat are an incredible force.
They were described in the Bigtable paper, and were widely used before leveldb was published (Cassandra, for example, used sstables and LSM concerts well before 2012)
I just wanted to point out that there is a good explanation of SSTables B-trees and other database structures in a whoke chapter of the great book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by Martin Klepmann.
In the middle of this book right now, specifically the unreliable clocks part. The explanations have the right amount of depth. It's a great read in so far.
not to mention, some awesome references at the end of each chapter. I had made it a point after each chapter to randomly pick an interesting reference and read that as well.
I just ordered the book from your recommendation, thanks.
I also discovered it on Hacker News, hope you'll enjoy it!