mongo-lite

A lightweight, embedded MongoDB-compatible document database written in Zig 0.16. Like SQLite, it stores everything in a single file; unlike SQLite, it speaks the MongoDB wire protocol, so real clients — mongosh, the Node.js driver, PyMongo — connect over TCP and just work.

Quick start

zig build                # build the server
zig build test           # run the unit test suite

zig-out/bin/mongo-lite --port 27017 --db data.log --compact-threshold 256m

# in another terminal:
mongosh --port 27017
> db.users.insertOne({name: "alice", age: 30})
> db.users.find({age: {$gt: 25}}).toArray()
> db.users.updateOne({name: "alice"}, {$set: {vip: true}})
> db.users.deleteOne({name: "bob"})
> db.sessions.createIndex({expireAt: 1}, {expireAfterSeconds: 3600})

Features

• Wire protocol: OP_MSG (2013) plus legacy OP_QUERY/OP_REPLY (2004/2001) for the driver handshake; hello/isMaster with maxWireVersion: 8, so modern drivers (Node, Python, mongosh) connect without workarounds.
• BSON: full parse/serialize round-trip for all common types (including binary, regex, timestamps, ObjectId), canonical MongoDB comparison order for sorting and range queries.
• CRUD: insert, find (filter, sort, skip/limit, projection), update (multi/upsert), delete, findAndModify, count, aggregate ($match, $sort, $skip, $limit, $project, $count, $group with $sum), plus create/drop/listCollections/ listDatabases/dropDatabase.
• Query operators: $eq $ne $gt $gte $lt $lte $in $nin $exists $regex (hand-rolled engine: anchors, ., * + ?, character classes, groups, alternation, i/s options) $not $and $or $nor $size $all $elemMatch, with dot paths and array multikey semantics.
• Secondary indexes: createIndex/listIndexes/dropIndex via the three driver commands, single-field and compound, with unique, sparse and expireAfterSeconds (TTL) options, persisted in the log and rebuilt on open (compaction re-emits them). A background sweeper expires TTL-indexed documents through the ordinary logged write path. The query planner turns equality / $in / range predicates into index lookups across find, count, update, delete, findAndModify, and a leading $match in aggregate; every candidate is re-checked against the full filter, so an index that over-approximates is merely slow, never wrong.
• Update operators: $set $unset $inc $push ($each) $pull $rename, with dot-path creation (including array indices).
• Storage: append-only record log, LZ4-compressed in 256 KiB blocks (XxHash3-checked, fsync per write, torn-tail tolerant: a crash mid-append truncates cleanly, interior corruption is rejected) with in-memory indexes rebuilt on open and automatic compaction (rewrite + atomic rename when the log grows past --compact-threshold, default 16 MB). Killed mid-write (kill -9), the database recovers all committed writes; the log and compaction both work with relative or absolute --db paths. Records up to the announced 16 MB maxBsonObjectSize replay correctly.
• Concurrency: a writer-preferring read/write lock splits command execution — reads (find, count, aggregate, list*) run concurrently across connections, writes (CRUD, DDL) are exclusive and totally ordered, and handshake/no-op commands run lock-free. The log append + fsync still happen under the write lock, so the crash guarantees are unchanged. Fine for light workloads.

Layout

src/
  bson.zig     BSON parse/serialize, ObjectId, canonical comparison order
  wire.zig     OP_MSG/OP_QUERY framing, message + reply builders
  commands.zig command dispatch (hello, CRUD, aggregate, admin, indexes)
  server.zig   TCP accept loop, per-connection handlers, TTL sweep monitor
  db.zig       in-memory engine: db → collection → _id → document maps
  storage.zig  append-only log: records, replay, CRC validation
  query.zig    filter matcher, regex engine, sort, projection
  index.zig    secondary indexes: entries, search, query planner
  update.zig   update operators with dot-path navigation
  main.zig     CLI: --port, --bind, --db, --ttl-sweep-secs, --compact-threshold

Indexes

collection.createIndex({field: 1}) works against every driver; the index is persisted in the log, survives restarts and compaction, and is used by the query planner to narrow scans.

• Key patterns: single-field and compound (up to 32 fields), each key 1 or -1. Descending order is metadata (entries are always stored value-ascending); the default index name is MongoDB's a_1_b_-1. createIndex({_id: 1}) is an idempotent no-op — the docs map is the _id_ index — and dropIndex("_id_") errors.
• Options: unique (a conflicting write fails with E11000 naming the index; per-document entries are deduped first, so {a: [1,1]} is legal) and sparse (documents missing an indexed field are skipped).
• TTL: createIndex({expireAt: 1}, {expireAfterSeconds: 60}) deletes a document once its indexed date is that many seconds old. A background sweeper runs every --ttl-sweep-secs seconds (default 60, 0 disables it) and deletes through the ordinary write path, so each expiry is logged and fsynced and holds across a restart. As in MongoDB the option is single-field only (a compound key is CannotCreateIndex, code 67), expireAfterSeconds must be a whole number in [0, 2147483647] (0 means "expire at the stored instant"), a non-date value at the path never expires, an array of dates expires on its earliest member, and expiry is coarse: a document stays visible until the next sweep. Re-creating an index with a different expiry is IndexOptionsConflict (85) and an expiry on {_id: 1} is InvalidIndexSpecificationOption (197), both as MongoDB has them.
• Multikey: an array at an indexed path is indexed as a whole and element-wise, mirroring the query matcher exactly, so both {tags: "a"} and {tags: ["a","b"]} hit the index. A compound index over two array paths rejects the document with MongoDB's "cannot index parallel arrays".
• Planner: picks the index covering the longest leading run of equality/$in predicates (cartesian product capped at 100 lookups), optionally with a range on the next key. Ranges with both bounds fall back to a scan on multikey indexes (a doc with {a: [1,2]} can satisfy {a: {$gt: 5, $lt: 25}} across two entries), and sparse indexes are never used for null-valued predicates. The _id_ fast path resolves {_id: ...} through the docs map unless the value's compare class is serialization-ambiguous (int32 1, int64 1, double 1.0 compare equal but hash differently — those fall back to a scan, as do string/symbol/code).

v1 limits: no hashed/text/geo/partial indexes, and entry insert is O(n) (a sorted array memmoves the tail) — fine for a light database, with a B-tree as the follow-up. Removal is no longer a scan: entry generation is a pure function of the document, so the entries to drop are regenerated and found by binary search. A TTL sweep walks every entry of every TTL index and holds the write lock for the whole pass, so the interval is the tuning knob: expiry is never more precise than --ttl-sweep-secs, and a very large TTL index wants a longer one.

Not (yet) implemented

• Authentication (SCRAM) — run without credentials
• Real cursors (all results are returned in one batch, cursor id 0)
• Transactions, change streams, replicasets
• Compression (OP_COMPRESSED)
• collMod, so an index's expireAfterSeconds cannot be changed in place — drop the index and re-create it with the new expiry
• dropCollection/dropDatabase write no log record, so a dropped collection (and its index definitions) resurrect on restart

Working with large collections

Everything lives in RAM (db → collection → _id → document maps) and every write command is logged with fsync before it is acknowledged (one sync per command via group commit — a 500-doc insertMany syncs once, not 500 times), so multi-GB collections work, with cost/behavior notes measured by the tests/e2e/big.js harness (12-core/32 GB Mac):

• Build in ReleaseFast — zig build defaults to it. A Debug server is 10-200x slower on every path (the matcher alone was 70 µs/doc in Debug vs 0.4 µs in ReleaseFast), which dwarfed every other difference in the MongoDB comparison below.
• Compaction no longer needs tuning for bulk loads. It triggers on the share of the log that is garbage rather than on bytes appended, so a pure insert workload — which has no garbage — is never rewritten, and a rewrite-heavy one is reclaimed once about a fifth of the log is dead, keeping the file near 1.25x the live data. --compact-threshold is now only a floor below which small logs are left alone. (It used to fire every 16 MB regardless, rewriting the whole log each time: quadratic total traffic, and the reason bulk loads needed a raised threshold.)
• findOne({_id}) is O(1) only for ObjectId ids. Integer, int64 and double ids compare equal but hash differently, so the docs-map fast path is skipped and every _id lookup becomes a full scan. Use the driver's default ObjectIds (or a secondary index) on big collections. The order-preserving key encoding already removes the ambiguity that forces this; lifting the restriction waits on an ordered _id index.
• Secondary-index entry insert is O(n) (sorted array — see v1 limits above), so inserting into a collection that already has an index is quadratic. Building an index over existing data is not: entries are appended unsorted and ordered once. Still cheapest to create indexes after the load.

Performance vs MongoDB

tests/e2e/compare-run.sh runs the same driver workload (1 GB, 65,536 × 16 KB docs, every write durable — mongo-lite fsyncs per command, mongod runs with j: true) against each server and prints a side-by-side table. With the ReleaseFast default build (MongoDB 8.3.7 on the same Mac):

benchmark	mongo-lite	mongodb	winner
insertOne (sequential)	0.20 ms	4.7 ms	mongo-lite ×24
bulk insert (insertMany)	752 MB/s	744 MB/s	mongo-lite
createIndex({k: 1})	67 ms	76 ms	mongo-lite
countDocuments({})	2.6 ms	11.2 ms	mongo-lite ×4
findOne({_id})	0.45 ms	0.65 ms	mongo-lite
findOne indexed	0.54 ms	4.6 ms	mongo-lite ×8
range-scan count	13.7 ms	12.6 ms	mongodb ×1.1
sort + limit(20), on _id	2.3 ms	2.0 ms	mongodb ×1.1
sort + limit(20), indexed field	1.0 ms	—	—
aggregate $group	8.1 ms	12.3 ms	mongo-lite
updateOne({_id})	0.15 ms	0.19 ms	mongo-lite
updateMany (65 docs)	1.7 ms	6.1 ms	mongo-lite ×3.6
deleteOne + insert	0.50 ms	4.9 ms	mongo-lite ×10
server RSS	539 MB	1.3 GB	mongo-lite ×2.4
kill -9 → reopen	0.8 s	1.3 s	mongo-lite
db on disk	97 MB	91 MB	mongodb

The engine now holds every document as canonical BSON bytes in a segmented per-collection slab (no per-document arena, no second Pair-tree copy), which is why RSS is a quarter of MongoDB's and the range scan — matching against the bytes directly, skipping fields by length — runs at parity. The log is LZ4-compressed in 256 KiB blocks, so the on-disk size matches MongoDB's compressed files. Bulk insert is compress-bound (the LZ4 codec runs at ~1.7 GB/s; deflate would cap writes below the insert rate, which is why the roadmap chose LZ4).

Reproduce the table with bash tests/e2e/compare-run.sh 1g 16k; the pre-tree baseline is recorded in tests/e2e/results/phase1.txt, and the runs with the B+tree, ordered _id index, compressed log and byte storage (roadmap items 1–4) in tests/e2e/results/phase2.txt through phase5.txt.

What is left (highest impact first)

Each is written up with its design decisions, ordering constraints and traps in ROADMAP.md.

The remaining structure is the single-file log (appends and the commit serialize on one log lock, though appends no longer hold the collection locks), and the acknowledged-write fsync, which dominates sequential per-client workloads. All five roadmap items are landed.

Done so far, with the measurement that drove each:

• Record integrity hash CRC32 → XxHash3. std.hash.Crc32 is table-driven and byte-at-a-time: 408 MB/s against XxHash3's 31 GB/s, or 38 µs versus 0.5 µs on a 16 KB document — about two thirds of the entire bulk-insert cost. Insert 260 → 700 MB/s.
• Compaction triggers on garbage, not on bytes written, and syncs once per rewrite instead of once per document. Bulk load at the default threshold 41.6 → 703 MB/s.
• Index builds append then sort once instead of inserting into a sorted array. createIndex over 65,536 documents 649 → 44 ms.
• Index entries hold encoded byte keys, so comparing them is a memcmp rather than a walk over values in unrelated arenas.
• A B+tree over the encoded keys (roadmap item 1): fixed 4 KiB slotted pages in a flat u32-addressed node array, an overflow slab for long records, no rebalancing on delete, and bulk bottom-up packing. Entry insertion and removal are a descent plus a leaf-local edit instead of a tail memmove, so writes into an already-built index stopped being quadratic. updateMany 17.3 → 1.6 ms (2.8x slower than MongoDB → 4x faster); createIndex 62 → 51 ms.
• An ordered _id index (roadmap item 2): every collection carries an implicit _id_ index (kept out of the secondary list, so the listing, drop and log-format surfaces are unchanged; rebuilt after replay like the secondaries). Its encoded keys are canonical, so the old serialization-guarded docs-map fast path is gone and integer/string _id point lookups, $in and ranges hit the tree instead of a full scan. sort({_id: ...}) is now an index-ordered scan with an early stop: sort+limit(20) 6.2 → 2.4 ms (parity with MongoDB).
• A block-framed, LZ4-compressed log (roadmap item 3): a file header plus ~256 KiB blocks, each holding the existing record framing with the integrity hash covering the stored bytes (so the decompressor only ever sees input already proven intact). Records never straddle blocks; a short read, impossible length or hash mismatch in the final block is a torn tail (truncate cleanly), anywhere else is corruption. The hand-rolled LZ4 codec runs at ~1.7 GB/s and falls back to raw per block when compression does not help. db on disk 1025 → 97 MB — now smaller than MongoDB's own compressed files.
• Byte storage without per-document arenas (roadmap item 4): documents live as canonical BSON bytes in a segmented per-collection slab; the docs map holds flat offsets (stable across segment growth, ≤ one segment of slack). The matcher walks the bytes directly, skipping by length any field the filter does not name (differential-tested against the tree matcher on a corpus), and the scan/aggregate paths never materialize stored documents; sort, projection, updates and index entry generation use a borrowed spine into the slab. server RSS 1979 → 539 MB (2.4x smaller than MongoDB); range-scan 22.5 → ~12 ms (parity, best run faster); proj 4.1 → 3.4 ms.
• Decomposed locks (roadmap item 5): collections are heap-allocated; a catalog rwlock guards the maps and each collection has its own rwlock (catalog → collection → log ordering, one collection at a time for the TTL sweep and compaction). Appends never fsync; a write command's epilogue commits once with a leader/follower group commit, and compaction snapshots collections without the log lock, retrying if a writer appended mid-snapshot. Acknowledged writes are fsynced before their reply; an unacknowledged write may vanish (ordinary w:1, j:true, no longer "the log describes ≥ memory"). Concurrent durable-insert throughput scales ~5.1k → 12.5k docs/s from 1 → 8 clients, ~14.8k at 32.
• Entry removal is a binary search, not a scan of the whole index. updateMany 15.4 → 5.5 ms.
• Top-k sort selection and an allocation-free decorate pass, plus index-supplied ordering when an index already holds candidates in the requested order. sort+limit(20) 40 → 4.3 ms, or 1.0 ms on an indexed field.
• limit reaches the scan, which used to materialize the whole collection before slicing, and countDocuments is answered by counting rather than by materializing and discarding every match.
• Matching collects candidates on the stack, resolves operators to an enum once per filter field rather than by string per document, and reuses one reply arena per connection.

Several real bugs surfaced while benchmarking:

• plan_id returned a pointer to a stack temporary (&.{e}) that dangled after the frame returned — Debug tolerated it, ReleaseFast read garbage, silently breaking every findOne({_id: <ObjectId>}). It now heap-copies the lookup value and frees it.
• Multi-doc writes fsynced once per document; they now group-commit (one fsync per command, same crash guarantees — verified by the kill -9 crash suites).
• Compaction fsynced once per live document, because the log it wrote into never had deferred syncing enabled — 65,536 fsyncs to rewrite a 1 GB collection.
• remove never checked the compaction threshold, so a delete-heavy workload grew the log without bound.

Code style

Zig 0.16 idioms (std.Io threaded through everything, unmanaged containers); user-declared functions use snake_case per this repo's house style.