JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is the data structure of the Web. It's a simple data format that allows programmers to store and communicate sets of values, lists, and key-value mappings across systems. JSON is really just a simple schema less language that was created to support web pages. If your data is small and simple then a JSON document database may work OK. If you have more connected and large data sets, it is not a good solution. When data gets more complex, larger and more connected, an object or graph database will get the job done much better with way better performance and scalability. First, JSON is very limited in data types supported, it only supports 4 data types: Number, String, Boolean and Array. Secondly, it is usually schema less meaning that you can store any JSON object without following any rules of what fields or field types each object contain. That means that each JSON object enters a database as a text string that is parsed to discover its fields and types. JSON does not support references between objects but references are often accomplished by designating one of the string fields to hold an object id using UUID text strings such as "6438850b-b33d-475f-95d7-8997606431a5".

Now compare this to how it is done with VelocityDB; Unlimited data types supported, almost any .NET data type can be persisted (one exception is Delegates as it involves code pointer data). VelocityDB uses a schema so that we can control what is stored. Any data, even unstructured, can still be stored as you can control how specific you make the schema. Having a schema enables serializing .NET object without having to describe each field data type, field name for each object stored. Redundancy is eliminated and objects can be used and stored as binary data with just the field values, not all its meta data, for each object. Having the schema gives structure that is used when constructing Linq queries. Support for object references is built in and only occupies 4 - 12 bytes in persistent storage. You can still use JSON when interacting with Web applications, Microsoft supports .NET object to/from JSON when used with frameworks such as Entity Framework. VelocityDB support import and export to/from JSON. Anything that can be done with a dedicated JSON database can also be done with VelocityDB. Simple comparisons between VelocityDB and JSON databases shows how performance and data size is affected by these differences. As data get larger these differences will increase. See comparison with MongoDB and Couchbase.

The most important benefit is the flexibility that this database system provides. No other types of database system lets you fine tune your application to the finest details. Using VelocityDB, you can choose the best possible data structures for your application. You can control where you place the data persistently and how it's indexed and accessed. With VelocityDB you will have the ultimate tool for persisting data efficiently with unbeatable performance.

Unstructured Data can be managed efficiently using VelocityDB. Several of the sample applications provided with the download explore unstructured data. The triangle counter test demonstrates how efficient it is to follow association/relations. In memory, an association in VelocityDB is simply a C# object reference. It can't get any more efficient than that. The Kevin Bacon Numbers sample is another example showing how efficient we can handle unstructured data. A common way to manage unstructured data is to add such data to an inverted index. That way we can efficiently query such data, like if we want to know what store products that match one or more words. The entire Google search mechanism is based on an inverted index. In some of our samples we use inverted indexes, these samples include; TextIndexer and Wikipedia.

A shopping web site in prototype production uses an inverted index to help shoppers find products they are looking for, try the product search here (it is not always online).  It currently manages about 30 million products from about 650 stores (~33 GB of data).

VelocityDB is extremely scalable; it can handle small applications with small amounts of persistent data as well as applications using trillions of objects up to about half a Yottabyte in size per session. Unlimited number of sessions can be used per application. Performance is fantastic, a billion Person object database is quickly created, a little over 1 hour, and can be browsed with the VelocityDbBrowser.

Relational databases and Standard Query Language (SQL) was invented in the 70ties, almost half a Century ago. It was good for its time but computer capabilities are about a million times improved and these days object oriented languages rule.

It's time for a replacement/complement to SQL and relational databases. We believe that object oriented and graph databases are ideal for today's complex applications using Object Oriented languages like C#, C++, Objective-C, Java, Python and Smalltalk.

If we are given a chance to prove it, we have the technology that can outperform traditional SQL solutions both in cost and performance.

If you are currently doing most development using C++, you may want to consider switching some development to use .NET Core 2.1 (and beyond). I, Mats, was myself using C++ for nearly 20 years and yes, it’s great for certain things but once I got into using C# my productivity increased substantially due to its simplicity vs C++. The main motivator for my switch was the meta data, .NET provides in form of reflection API. Not having to worry about freeing up memory is also helping.

Maybe you are currently developing using a scripting language like Python, you are not discovering issues with code disconnects at compile time and performance is not great. You really want to use a strongly typed language like C# instead.

If Java is your current language, you may want to switch to gain advantage of better performing .NET, features like LINQ and Asp.Net Core.

If you are storing application data using MongoDB or other JSON database, you are redundantly storing each object schema with each object stored and you are limited to 5 data types. Like you can’t even store very large 64 bit integers because all JSON numbers are represented as a 64 bit float/double.

So if you are already using .NET then you should give the pure .NET database engine VelocityDB a chance. It’s very first version was released in 2011, now seven years later it is feature packed and stable both as used as an embedded (serverless) database engine and as a distributed server based solution.