nimforum mirror - Nim Meets YottaDB – High-Performance Database Binding

ljoeckel (orginal) [2025-10-10T23:27:08+02:00] view original

I'm excited to announce a new language binding that connects Nim with YottaDB, a fast, hierarchical, key-value database engine designed for high-performance, transaction-processed applications.

YottaDB is:

Blazing fast and built for high concurrency

Stable and mature (over decades), used in production systems worldwide (including healthcare)

ACID-compliant with robust data integrity features

Efficient database replication

💡 What Does the Nim Binding Offer?

Direct access to YottaDB’s native API from Nim

Efficient key-value operations with hierarchical storage

A DSL that allows access to the database as 'language feature'

Nim is now listed as another language to access YottaDB (https://docs.yottadb.com/MultiLangProgGuide/index.html) 🔗 Learn More Check out the full blog post on the YottaDB site: 👉 Nim Meets YottaDB (https://yottadb.com/nim-meets-yottadb)

The project is available on https://github.com/ljoeckel/nim-yottadb

elcritch (orginal) [2025-10-12T02:37:08+02:00] view original

Out of curiosity what's the "sales pitch" for YottaDB that made it worthwhile to make Nim bindings?

ITwrx (orginal) [2025-10-12T15:23:59+02:00] view original

Thanks for sharing your work. Always nice to have another db option. One small nitpick; I see Nim written as "NIM" in the github README text and in the About section. NIM is some nvidia thing. Nim is the lang.

ljoeckel (orginal) [2025-10-12T22:33:47+02:00] view original

I'm sorry if that came across as a sales pitch. That wasn't the intention. I have no relationship with the YottaDB company. For me personally, the flexibility of a hierarchical key-value database was very interesting, as it allows you to map practically all other data models. Relational, graph, JSON, etc. And of course, the performance. That impressed me greatly. With the current Nim/YottaDB binding, I can write 4.1 million records per second on a Mac Mini M4 and traverse the index at 6.5 million records per second. I started nim-yottadb as a Nim learning project, and I was particularly interested in the possibility of developing a DSL using macros, which allows the database to be used as if embedded in the language.

elcritch (orginal) [2025-10-13T05:42:30+02:00] view original

I'm sorry if that came across as a sales pitch.

To the contrary, I was asking for a sales pitch! ;)

Rather, I'm more interested in what got you interested in YottaDB. The standard list of features is good, but it's more interesting to hear about personal reasons.

For me personally, the flexibility of a hierarchical key-value database was very interesting, as it allows you to map practically all other data models. Relational, graph, JSON, etc.

That's pretty interesting. Usually key-value don't support relational or other things.

With the current Nim/YottaDB binding, I can write 4.1 million records per second on a Mac Mini M4 and traverse the index at 6.5 million records per second

Okay, that's pretty fast. Does it support transactions?

ljoeckel (orginal) [2025-10-13T09:36:22+02:00] view original

Personal Interest: My plan is to build a "Media Container" that has all the media-data and meta data in one place. Is safe, can be easily replicated and so on.

Relational Support: https://yottadb.com/product/octo-sql-for-analytics/ As far as i know they use Postgresql wire protocol, so that any jdbc, odbc, ole db driver should work. I've never tried for myself.

Transactions: Yes, they have transactions. I've made some benchmarks with/without WriteAheadLog and Transaction boundaries. See code and results below.


proc myTxn(p0: pointer): cint {.cdecl.} =
  let i = $cast[cstring](p0)
  try:
    ydb_set("^GBL", @[i], i)
  except:
    return YDB_TP_ROLLBACK
  
  YDB_OK # commit the transaction

# with Transaction
timed:
    for i in 0..10000000:
        let rc = ydb_tp(myTxn, $i)
        if rc != YDB_OK:
            echo "Error ", rc

# without Transaction
timed:
    for i in 0..10000000:
        ydb_set("^GBL", @[$i], $i)
       #discard ydb_get("^GBL", @[$i])

Empty database for each run created


          WriteAhead Duration Duration
Operation   Log      1. run   2. run   threads Transaction
Set         Off      4456 ms  3917 ms    on
Get         Off               3123 ms    on
Set         On       4315 ms  4091 ms    on
Get         On                3101 ms    on

Set         Off      2394 ms  2044 ms    off
Get         Off               1380 ms    off
Set         On       2402 ms  2076 ms    off
Get         On                1557 ms    off

Set         On       3583 ms  2994 ms    off     yes

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