API Archives

New Cursor API leads to significant performance improvements

April 2, 201500API, PerformanceTags: API, Performance

This week we pushed some modifications for ArangoDB’s cursor API into the devel branch. The change will result in less copying of AQL query results between the AQL and the HTTP layers. As a positive side effect, this will reduce the amount of garbage collection the built-in V8 has to do.

These modifications should improve the cursor API performance significantly for many cases, while at the same time keeping its REST API stable. Client programs do not need to be adjusted to reap the benefits. In a blog post, Jan shows some first unscientific performance tests comparing the old cursor API with its new, improved implementation.
More info

Securing your Foxx with API Keys

March 5, 201502API, Foxx, SecurityTags: API, Foxx

ArangoDB’s Foxx allows you to easily build an API to access your data sources. But now this API is either public or restricted to users having an account, but those still get unlimited access.

In many use cases you do not want to expose your data in this fashion, but you want to expose it with a more controllable access pattern and want to restrict the requests one user could issue in a certain time period. Popular examples for these API restrictions are Twitter or Facebook. This allows you to offer all of your data but only in limited chunks, and then possibly charge your customers to increase the chunk limit they can request.

All this is done via API keys, which are bound to a user and has become a common pattern to monetize the data you have collected. More info

Building a self-learning game with ArangoDB, io.js & AngularJS in half a day.

January 27, 201500API, Foxx, Javascript, nodejsTags: API, Foxx

With the ArangoDB Foxx Microservice Framework we’ve introduced an easy way to create a Web API right on top of the NoSQL database.

In early January Max challenged Andreas (AngularJS / NodeJS) that they could build a full-stack application within half a day.

The web application – in short – is a guessing game, in which the computer tries to guess a thing or animal you think of by asking a series of questions, for which you provide the answers. More info

Getting started with Guacamole on Rails

December 18, 201402API, Documentation, RubyTags: API, Ruby

Please note that parts of this article will not work out of the box with ArangoDB 3.0

Using ArangoDB as your main database is a good idea for various reasons. What I personally like about it is its query language AQL. I used relational databases in the past as my main database and writing statements in a language similar to SQL was a great way for me to get started with ArangoDB.

Having a HTTP based interface (like all the cool kids these days) we could build applications running solely on top of our database. That’s rather nice but then we would have to take care of all the gory details. So for our app we want at least an abstraction layer on top of the HTTP API. Better yet, something assisting us with modeling our domain logic.

Meet Guacamole: A object-document-mapper that takes care of all the busywork and allows you to focus on your domain. More info

Building Hypermedia APIs – FoxxGenerator

December 8, 201400API, FoxxTags: API

This is the third and final part of Lucas blog series about building hypermedia APIs. In the previous part, we identified the needed transitions and collected some information about each of them. Begin with blog post one to get familiar with concepts on Hypermedia and JSON.

We can now describe the identified transitions using FoxxGenerator. To make the most common case simple, it defaults to the type follow. Therefore defining our four follow transitions is easy using FoxxGenerator:

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generator.defineTransition('books');

generator.defineTransition('users');

generator.defineTransition('item');

generator.defineTransition('likes');

Note that at this point we are just defining the transitions, we are not adding them to the statemachine we are describing with the help of FoxxGenerator. In the case of creating a book, we need to add additional information. First of, it is a connect transition. Secondly we also need to define the parameters that this transition needs:

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generator.defineTransition('createBook', {

type: 'connect',

parameters: {

title: Joi.string()

}

});

More info

API changes in ArangoDB 1.2

February 16, 201300API, GeneralTags: API, Release

Apart from introducing several new features, the upcoming 1.2 version of ArangoDB will change a few of the existing REST API return values.
The API changes were necessary to make the ArangoDB’s APIs easier to use, more robust and portable.

We hope that the following list provides 3rd party client & driver maintainers with enough information to update drivers to work with ArangoDB 1.2.
More info

Feature preview: batch request API in ArangoDB 1.1

October 7, 201201GeneralTags: API

Clients normally send individual operations to ArangoDB in individual HTTP requests. This is straightforward and simple, but has the disadvantage that the network overhead can be significant if many small requests are issued in a row.

To mitigate this problem, ArangoDB 1.1 offers a batch request API that clients can use to send multiple operations in one batch to ArangoDB. This method is especially useful when the client has to send many HTTP requests with a small body/payload and the individual request results do not depend on each other.
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Gain factor of 5 using batch requests

October 4, 201203General, PerformanceTags: API, Performance

ArangoDB 1.1 will come with a new API for batch requests. This batch request API allows clients to send multiple requests to the ArangoDB server inside one multipart HTTP request. The server will then decompose the multipart request into the individual parts and process them as if they were sent individually. The communication layer can sustain up-to 800.000 requests/second – but absolute numbers strongly depend on the number of cores, the type of the requests, network connections and other factors. More important are the relative numbers: Depending on your use-case you can reduce insert/update times by 80%.
More info

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