What the hell is that JSON-DB?

Posted on by c-smile

JSON-DB… You can, probably, guess that it’s a compound word, which consists of JSON and DB (database). And you are absolutely right! It’s a way to save javascript objects in a persistent storage.

Let’s imagine that you have a state object in javascript, which you’d love to persist. And the state consists of different objects of different types. Wouldn’t be nice to say: 

db.state = state;

Or, alternatively restore the same state with:

var state = db.state;

Do you like it? How about:


db.messages[key] = 
  { 
     text: "Hello world!",
     id: 456,
     author: authorObj;
  };

Thus, if JSON helps you to get data and easily evaluate into native javascript objects, JSON-DB allows you to seamlessly work with persistent data in javascript. Any scripting object can be persisted in the database and there is no need to use special entities like recordset, field, etc.

JSON-DB (a.k.a. persistent storage) is implemented in version 2.0 of TiScript engine:

  1. supports up to 2 GB storage size.
  2. supports transactions: commit/rollback
  3. uses lazy reads, e.g. only top level objects are loaded physically. Objects are loaded from storage on demand.
  4. storage supports indexes: storage.createIndex( String | Integer | Float ). Index object supports effective index access: [key] and range [ key1 .. key2 ]. Indexes use effective B+Tree algorithm.
  5. TiScript extended by two additional core objects: Storage and Index. Objects and Arrays got storage attribute referring to the Storage the object stored in (if any)

Persistent Storage implementation in TiScript is based on Konstantin’s Knizhnik excellent DyBase library modified to support TiScript “natively”.