ANN: ForestDB

[Jens Alfke]

The next-generation ForestDB storage engine that I've mentioned here a few times is now available in beta form, as announced today on Couchbase's blog. Its Github repository has the source code and some documentation including a good overview.

ForestDB is a fast and space-efficient key-value storage engine that can be used as an embedded storage layer for applications running on high-end servers or mobile devices. Its main index structure is built from Hierarchical B+-Tree based Trie, or HB+-Trie, to address the main drawbacks of typical B+-Tree index structure that has been widely used in traditional database systems. … From our benchmark results, we observed that ForestDB especially shows much better I/O performance on Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and flash memory.

I've been working with ForestDB since March, integrating it into Couchbase Lite to replace SQLite. This wiki page describes the project at a high level. It's still a work in progress (as is ForestDB itself), but I've seen speedups from 2x to 5x in common tasks (measured on an iPhone 5) — see the chart below.

You can try it out for yourself, if you like. The instructions are here. At a high level, you just need to check out the "forestdb" branch of couchbxse-lite-ios and build it. Everything should work the same, just faster, with a few exceptions.

(By the way, if you're interested in using ForestDB directly you might be interested in the C++ wrapper library I wrote around it. It adds an OO API, indexes, and structured keys. It's theoretically cross-platform, though at the moment I think it still has a few minor Mac/iOS-specific bits.)

I'm really excited that ForestDB is finally public. I've been enjoying using it and it's great to finally be able to share the project with you. We don't yet have a firm release date for Couchbase Lite-with-ForestDB, but we're planning to release it at the same time that ForestDB itself goes 1.0.

—Jens

[Cristian A Moterroza]

Jens,

I think I’m speaking for everybody on the list: this is awesome! Great work!

-- 
Cristian A Monterroza

(718) 877 - 9948

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[Cristian Monterroza]

Jens, 

Is the couchbaselabs/forestdb repo public? I’m getting an error when I try to initialize the ForestDB submodule. 

$ git checkout forestdb

D vendor/CBForest

Already on 'forestdb'

Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/forestdb'.

$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Cloning into 'vendor/CBForest'...

remote: Repository not found.

fatal: repository 'https://github.com/couchbaselabs/cbforest.git/' not found

Clone of 'https://github.com/couchbaselabs/cbforest.git' into submodule path 'vendor/CBForest' failed

Cristian A. Monterroza
(718) 877-9948

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[Jens Alfke]

On Oct 2, 2014, at 3:47 PM, Cristian Monterroza <cmont...@wrkstrm.me> wrote:

Is the couchbaselabs/forestdb repo public? I’m getting an error when I try to initialize the ForestDB submodule. 

Oops, it's couchbaselabs/cbforest that isn't public. Let me fix that.

…ok, you should be able to clone now.

—Jens

[Todd Freese]

Very cool!

Is there any documentation on how an existing app would handle an upgrade to forestDB on iOS?

Todd

[Jens Alfke]

On Oct 2, 2014, at 4:07 PM, Todd Freese <to...@filmworkers.com> wrote:

Is there any documentation on how an existing app would handle an upgrade to forestDB on iOS?

Yes, in the instructions. :)

—Jens

[Todd Freese]

D'oh! Sorry about that. 

t

[dyowee]

Awesome! Will it have encryption?

[Jens Alfke]

On Oct 3, 2014, at 2:14 PM, dyowee <csharpen...@gmail.com> wrote:

Awesome! Will it have encryption?

I think they plan to add encryption support, but unlike SQLite there isn't an existing encryption plug-in.

—Jens