Introducing Realm
Today we are very proud to introduce Realm, the first database built from the ground-up to run directly inside phones, tablets and wearables, and the fruit of several years of labor since we came out of YCombinator. Realm uses very little resources, is incredibly easy to use, and lets you interact with your data faster than any current alternative.
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Realm’s designed to give you amazing ease-of-use: data is directly exposed as objects and queryable by code, removing the need for ORM’s riddled with performance & maintenance issues. Plus, we’ve worked hard to keep our API down to just 3 common classes (Object, Arrays and Realms) and 1 utility class (Migrations): most of our users pick it up intuitively, getting simple apps up & running in minutes.
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Realm also offers a full set of checks and guarantees to make it easier for you to build apps without shooting yourselves in the foot, including full ACID transactions by default and an object schema that is enforced directly through your object definitions. Finally, a lot of you will be happy to hear that Realm databases are safe across threads so you can easily asynchronize tasks without any cognitive overhead whatsoever, and finally explore all the concurrency potential of multi-core handsets.
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We’ve seen many libraries try to offer a similar level of features on top of SQLite, at the expense of speed. In contrast, Realm is faster than even raw SQLite on common operations, while maintaining an extremely rich feature set.
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Realm’s efficiency comes from years of work on a custom C++ core designed to fit the needs of much more primitive devices, that leverages bit-packing, caching, vectorization and a zero-copy architecture to realize truly amazing gains in memory usage and speed. Since Realm internals allow for easy concurrency and measurement of deltas and follows an MVCC model, we are also working on adding sync capabilities to Realm.
Here’s the GitHub project.
