History

In May 2013, Louis Chatriot began developing a lightweight embeddable and in memory database system that used a subset of the MongoDB API. It was completed in 2017 and now is on GitHub where individuals can contribute to the project by fixing several bugs but no additional features are being implemented. However, several separate teams have forked copies of the original NeDB database and began implementing their own ideas and additional features that weren't originally intended by the original creator.

Checkpoints

Concurrency Control[05]

NeDB does not support concurrency because each process receives its own copy of the database and there is no way to sync the views that two separate processes have of the database. Additionally, Javascript is inherently single-threaded resulting in no concurrency.

Data Model

Indexes[06][07][08]

NeDB supports indexing and helps provide a sufficient speed boost. It allows for indexing of any field, including those in nested documents. An index can be created at any point, even after data has been inserted, although it is most efficient if done when the application is started because the index is created synchronously. The time to create an index is quite fast so it doesn't impact startup time too much, for example it takes 35ms for a database containing 10,000 documents. Additionally, indexes allow for the database to perform fast reads and writes. The amount is approximately 5,000 writes and 25,000 reads per second.

Isolation Levels

NeDB does not support any isolation levels because no concurrency is guaranteed by the system.

Joins[09][10]

Although MongoDB does support joins, NeDB does not because the only similarites between NeDB and MongoDB are the syntax for queries used in the API. NeDB does not support joins because it is not a relational database but rather a document store database.

Logging[03]

NeDB does not support logging because all data is stored in memory. However, a NeDB logger has been created that can be used to insert documents into a NeDB-readable database.

Query Interface

The JavaScript API is a subset of MongoDB.

Storage Architecture[11]

NeDB stores all databases in memory in order to perform fast find and query operations. Storing all the data in memory causes NeDB to only perform well on smaller datasets.

Storage Organization

Stored Procedures

System Architecture