MongoDB VS LiteDB

MongoDB — a database service

MongoDB is an open source NoSQL Document database which horizontally scales utilizing clustered servers in replica-sets. A great option for testing and performing local development with MongoDB is using Docker and Docker Compose. The following docker compose spec will create a local docker container running MongoDB with the data persisted to a docker volume.

MongoDB (Mongoose)

Databases Backend developers use databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB (NoSQL), or Redis (an in-memory database) to store and manage data. It is important for persistent data storage and retrieval in web applications.

MongoDB{:target="_blank"} is a document-oriented database with high scalability and flexibility for handling unstructured or semi-structured data. It offers rich querying capabilities, indexing options, and support for distributed data storage with a technique called “sharding”.

NoSQL databases are non-relational databases with flexible schema designed for high performance at a massive scale. Unlike traditional relational databases, which use tables and predefined schemas, NoSQL databases use a variety of data models. There are 4 main types of NoSQL databases - document, graph, key-value, and column-oriented databases. NoSQL databases generally are well-suited for unstructured data, large-scale applications, and agile development processes. The most popular examples of NoSQL databases are MongoDB (document), Memgraph (graph), Redis (key-value store) and Apache HBase (column-oriented).

Our example application will be based on the ME*N stack where M is a MongoDB (but it could be MySQL, or any other) database. E is for Express, which is a backend framework that sits on top of Node.JS. There are others but Express is extremely common and will meet our needs well. N is for the JavaScript runtime Node.js but Deno and Bun are possible alternatives. Finally the * is for the frontend framework such as Angular (MEAN), React (MERN) or Vue (MEVN), to name a few. However, in our example we will not be using a framework (to keep it agnostic and besides it is not that complicated), instead we will be using the native web technologies (HTML, CSS and JS).

MongoDB is a highly scalable document-type database. Its flexible schema approach allows developers to adapt and modify the data structure as needed, providing agility in application development.

MongoDB is an open-source, document-oriented database, meaning it stores data in a semi-structured format similar to JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), known as BSON (Binary JSON).

Are you aware of LiteDB? It seems like your project is going for a very similar niche. Most people looking for this type of thing will probably go for the more mature and feature-rich solution (LiteDB). So if your project has some unique value proposition to distinguish it from LiteDB, you should elaborate on that.

Looks like LiteDb is thread safe so it would be useful to see the error stack and the exact error message.

Please consider using the primary key to generate an unique value on the db side.

LiteDB

Before checking this out, people might want to take a look through the issues and pull requests of which there are 500+ and 50+ respectively [1]. I was really optimistic about this project and it was headed in a great direction, but it's not in a production ready state, and it seems that the main guy behind it has decided to move onto other things. It's been about a year since there was any significant activity.

I just mention this because a lot of these little issues might only become more apparent after integrating the db into your project and so it can be a bit annoying. I ended up swapping to Linq2DB [1]. It's something, more or less, similar offering an ORM/LINQ type system as well as the ability to also use direct SQL if desired. But the neat thing is that it also uses a standardized API for the LINQ query language, so you can do things like swap from SQLite to PostgreSQL in one* line of code, so long as you're not using any provider specific extensions.

[1] - https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB

[2] - https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db

One reason:

SQLite is slower than LiteDB in this benchmark project created by the LiteDB inventor

https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB-Benchmark

https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB/issues/291

Another (lesser) reason is the similarity to MongoDB methods, if that's what you are used to it will feel familiar, but no MongoDB server needed.

A mature NoSQL embedded/flatfile database like LiteDB would be nice. There are some similar Rust libraries but they aren't very close to production ready and the API tends to not be too user friendly. I had trouble finding one of these for a small app I had to write recently.