# Mongoose 0.1.0 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [July 19, 2006, 5:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongoose-0-1-0/99004 "2006-07-19T17:43:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/5e9695/32.png) [@Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jamey_C)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2006, 5:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongoose-0-1-0/99004/1 "2006-07-19T17:43:59Z")
Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has an ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing, and Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose, because, like Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it to be small, quick, and friendly. You can download it from: [http://rubyforge.org/projects/mongoose/](http://rubyforge.org/projects/mongoose/) ## _Credits_ Thanks to Logan C. for letting me steal a lot of the code from KirbyRecord. Thanks to Ezra Z. and Fabien F., whose ez\_where Rails plugin, provided much of the inspiration for the query language. Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on KirbyBase. I have tried to put all the lessons learned from developing that library to good use here. ## _Features_ - Pure Ruby, with no external dependencies. - ActiveRecord-like interface. - Fast queries on indexed fields (Up to 10x faster than KirbyBase). Indexes are Skiplists, which are just plain fun to play around with. - Not an in-memory database. Data is only read in from disk when needed and changes are immediately written out to disk. - In-memory indexes are initialized from dedicated index files, rather than rebuilt from scratch upon database initialization (like KirbyBase does). This can greatly reduce startup times. - Supports any data type that Marshal supports. - Table relations supported via has\_one, has\_many. ## _Why?_ Well, I started to look into performance improvements for KirbyBase. One thing I noticed was that Ruby takes a comparatively long time converting strings to native data types like Integer, Time, etc. Since KirbyBase stores its records as strings, returning a large result set could take a long time. I found that if I Marshaled records before I wrote them to disk, a subsequent read of those records was significantly faster. About the same time, I read a paper about skiplists. A skiplist is a data structure that is relatively simple (compared to say a b-tree) to understand and implement in code. I was able to take the pseudo-code in the paper and implement a Ruby version in a couple of hours. Skiplists are pretty fast and since they are pretty easy to understand, I think there is good potential to tweak them. So, I wanted to try using skiplists for indexing rather than KirbyBase’s array-based indexes. I started to retrofit both the Marshal serialization and Skiplists in KirbyBase, but quickly found that it was going to be more work than just starting over from scratch with a new design. Besides, I didn’t want to radically change KirbyBase and piss off the current user base (both of you know who you are). So, I started from scratch. This also gave me the opportunity to make two other major changes. First of all, I wanted to keep the query language as close to KirbyBase’s as possible (i.e. Ruby blocks), but I wanted more control over the query expression. I took the opportunity to borrow a lot of idea’s from Ezra’s ez\_where plugin. I think this will give me the capability down the road to tweak the query engine, based on the query itself. The second thing I changed was that I have finally seen the light about ActiveRecord, so I stole pretty much all of Logan’s KirbyRecord code to give Mongoose an ActiveRecord-like api. The end result of all of this (I hope) is a database management system that is small, easy to use, and fast. _What about KirbyBase?_ ---
**Author:** ![Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/5e9695/32.png) [@Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jamey_C)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2006, 6:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongoose-0-1-0/99004/2 "2006-07-19T18:50:15Z")
On Jul 19, 2006, at 10:41 AM, Jamey C. wrote: > Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has > an ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing, > and Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose, > because, like Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it > to be small, quick, and friendly. This really interesting stuff Jamey. Thanks for sharing! James Edward G. II ---
**Author:** ![Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/5e9695/32.png) [@Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jamey_C)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2006, 6:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongoose-0-1-0/99004/3 "2006-07-19T18:09:01Z")
On Jul 19, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Jamey C. wrote: > Thanks to Logan C. for letting me steal a lot of the code from Jamey- ``` This looks awesome! I totally have a few good uses for this. I will ``` be playing with this and giving you feedback and maybe a few patches as i get familiar with it. Thanks Jamey! -Ezra ---
**Author:** ![Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/5e9695/32.png) [@Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jamey_C)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2006, 3:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongoose-0-1-0/99004/4 "2006-07-20T03:15:26Z")
Ezra Z. wrote: > Jamey- > > ``` > This looks awesome! I totally have a few good uses for this. I > > ``` > > will be playing with this and giving you feedback and maybe a few > patches as i get familiar with it. Thank _you_ for ez\_where! I have to admit that, even though I looked at your code, I still couldn’t totally wrap my head around how you had made some of the ez\_where magic happen. So, if you do get a chance to look at my query code and give me any pointers on what I could do better, that would be great. Jamey ---
**Author:** ![Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/5e9695/32.png) [@Jamey\_C](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jamey_C)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2006, 8:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongoose-0-1-0/99004/5 "2006-07-19T20:02:47Z")
On 7/19/06, Jamey C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has an > ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing, and > Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose, because, like > Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it to be small, quick, > and friendly. Great job!