Always profile! The hidden cost of serializing large object graphs to JSON

We were looking at the cost of writing 10,000 documents to RavenDB and found out something truly interesting. The documents in question are complex, this is an object graph that includes over 120 objects belonging to 20 different classes. The serialized JSON is over 16KB in size. It is expected that something like that would take a lot of…

Dealing with large documents (100+ MB)

RavenDB can handle large documents. There actually is a limit to the size of a document in RavenDB, but given that it is 2 GB in size, that isn’t a practical one. I actually had to go and check if the limit was 2 or 4 GB, because it doesn’t actually matter. That said, having large documents is something that you should be wary of. They work, but…

My interview with Canal do Jorge Maia is now up–My career and the history of RavenDB

I think it was a very interesting discussion, you can watch it here: …

I’ll be speaking on Build Stuff conference this week

I’ll be speaking in the Build Stuff conference about the design of RavenDB Cloud, how we built the backend and control plane for a multi cloud, highly available database as a service platform. The key concept that I’m going to be talking about is that we need simplicity, in the design, in development and in…

Tech Community: Interviews on the JorgeCast

The failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed

The title of this post is a reference to a quote by Leslie Lamport: “A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”. A few days ago, my blog was down. The website was up, but it was throwing errors about being unable to connect to the database. That is surprising,…

Putting JSON in a block chain? First decide what your JSON is…

RavenDB is a document database, as such, it stores data in JSON format. We have had a few cases of users that wanted to use RavenDB as the backend of various blockchains. I’m not going to touch on their reasoning. I think that a blockchain is a beautiful construct, but one that is searching for a good niche to solve. The reason for this post,…

Webinar Recording: Advanced Search Scenarios in RavenDB

RavenDB is built to be your main database. It’s the system of record where you store all of your information. To minimize complexity, work, and cost, RavenDB also contains a fully-fledged full-text search engine. You can perform full text searches, but you don’t need a plugin or addon. This enables you to find interesting documents based on quite…

re: Investigating query performance issue in RavenDB

At the beginning of the year, we run into a problematic query. The issue was the use of an in clause vs. a series of OR. You can see the previous investigation results here. We were able to pinpoint the issue pretty well, very deep in the guts of Lucene, our query engine. Fast Query Slow Query Time: 1 – 2 ms Time: 60 – 90 ms The…