isabella232 / noms

The versioned, forkable, syncable database

Use Cases  |  Setup  |  Status  |  Documentation  |  Contact

Welcome

Noms is a decentralized database philosophically descendant from the Git version control system.

Like Git, Noms is:

• Versioned: By default, all previous versions of the database are retained. You can trivially track how the database evolved to its current state, easily and efficiently compare any two versions, or even rewind and branch from any previous version.
• Synchronizable: Instances of a single Noms database can be disconnected from each other for any amount of time, then later reconcile their changes efficiently and correctly.

Unlike Git, Noms is a database, so it also:

• Primarily stores structured data, not files and directories (see: the Noms type system)
• Scales well to large amounts of data and concurrent clients
• Supports atomic transactions (a single instance of Noms is CP, but Noms is typically run in production backed by S3, in which case it is "effectively CA")
• Supports efficient indexes (see: Noms prolly-trees)
• Features a flexible query model (see: GraphQL)

A Noms database can reside within a file system or in the cloud:

• The (built-in) NBS ChunkStore implementation provides two back-ends which provide persistence for Noms databases: one for storage in a file system and one for storage in an S3 bucket.

Finally, because Noms is content-addressed, it yields a very pleasant programming model.

Working with Noms is declarative. You don't INSERT new data, UPDATE existing data, or DELETE old data. You simply declare what the data ought to be right now. If you commit the same data twice, it will be deduplicated because of content-addressing. If you commit almost the same data, only the part that is different will be written.

Use Cases

Decentralization

Because Noms is very good at sync, it makes a decent basis for rich, collaborative, fully-decentralized applications.

Mobile Offline-First Database

Embed Noms into mobile applications, making it easier to build offline-first, fully synchronizing mobile applications.

Install

1. Download the latest release:

• Linux
• Mac OS

2. Unzip the directory somewhere and add it to your $PATH
3. Verify Noms is installed correctly:

$ noms version
format version: 7.18
built from <developer build>

Run

Import some data:

go install github.com/attic-labs/noms/samples/go/csv/csv-import
curl 'https://data.cityofnewyork.us/api/views/kku6-nxdu/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD' > /tmp/data.csv
csv-import /tmp/data.csv /tmp/noms::nycdemo

Explore:

noms show /tmp/noms::nycdemo

Should show:

struct Commit {
  meta: struct Meta {
    date: "2017-09-19T19:33:01Z",
    inputFile: "/tmp/data.csv",
  },
  parents: set {},
  value: [  // 236 items
    struct Row {
      countAmericanIndian: "0",
      countAsianNonHispanic: "3",
      countBlackNonHispanic: "21",
      countCitizenStatusTotal: "44",
      countCitizenStatusUnknown: "0",
      countEthnicityTotal: "44",
...

Status

Nobody is working on this right now. You shouldn't rely on it unless you're willing to take over development yourself.

Major Open Issues

These are the major things you'd probably want to fix before relying on this for most systems.

• Sync performance with long commit chains (attic-labs#2233)
• Migration (attic-labs#3363)
• Garbage Collection (attic-labs#3374)
• Query language
  • We started trying to hack in GraphQL but it's incomplete and maybe not the right thing. See: ngql
• Various other smaller bugs and improvements

Learn More About Noms

For the decentralized web: The Decentralized Database

Learn the basics: Technical Overview

Tour the CLI: Command-Line Interface Tour

Tour the Go API: Go SDK Tour

Contact Us

Interested in using Noms? Awesome! We would be happy to work with you to help understand whether Noms is a fit for your problem. Reach out at:

• Mailing List
• Twitter

Licensing

Noms is open source software, licensed by Attic Labs, Inc. under the Apache License, Version 2.0.