In this post we’ll explain how ArangoDB stores collection data on disk and look at its storage space requirements, compared to other popular NoSQL databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB.

How ArangoDB allocates disk space

ArangoDB stores documents in collections. The collection data is persisted on disk so it does not get lost in case of a server restart.

…or: The Great Server Shootout

ArangoDB is a database server that talks HTTP with its clients: clients send HTTP requests to ArangoDB over TCP/IP, ArangoDB will process them and send back the results to the client, packaged as HTTP over TCP/IP.

ArangoDB’s communication layer is thus the foundation for almost all database operations, and it needs to be fast to not become a bottleneck, blocking further database operations.To assess the actual performance of the communication layer, we did some benchmarks that compare ArangoDB’s network and HTTP processing capabilities with those of other..

Having a long history with relational databases and having worked for a lot of years with SQL some people find it a bit inconvenient querying nosql databases e.g. via REST. Others have rather complex data models and need nevertheless an elegant and convenient way for querying. And we all love clean and simple interfaces.

ArangoDB comes with a couple of options for querying the data, among offer it implements the “ArangoDB Query Language” (AQL).

AQL is a declarative query language for simple and also very complex queries. Unless like in other nosql databases you can also query across..

The REST API for AvocadoDB is already available and stable and people are writing APIs using it. Awesome. As AvocacoDB offers more complex data structures like graphs and lists REST is not enough. We implemented a first version of a query language some time ago which is very similar to SQL and UNQL.