A Look Into Realm’s Core DB Engine
The whole point of Realm, or at least one of its very core ideas, is that it is objects all the way down. That was one of the driving principles that encouraged us to start fresh, rather than using an existing relational model. If you look at existing solutions that are currently out there, they tend to be ORMs. More often than not, there’s this conceptual object-oriented model that people are working with, which is really an abstraction of what’s going on underneath. Usually, these are records, tables with foreign keys, and primary keys. As soon as you start to have relationships, the abstraction starts to fall apart because you start needing expensive operations to be able to traverse these relationships.
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As soon as you add this
companyobject to the Realm, it becomes an accessor. Once you start reading properties from it, you’re no longer accessing your ivars, you’re accessing the raw database values, with the benefit of cutting out four or five steps and a bunch of memory copy along the way.[…]
Even though we’re doing this composition by adding one filter after another, we’re not redoing all these queries, we’re essentially building a tree of what the result should look like. Even if you just access the first result out of this query, we’re not going to have to read all the properties for all the other objects, because we really try to keep it lazy.
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There are a bunch of optimizations that we can make at the core level such as native links at the file format level.
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An important part and design consideration for the core file format was to make sure that the format on disk was readable in memory without having to do any deserialization. You skip that whole step. All you do is calculate the offset of the data to read in your memory-mapped memory, read that value from the offset to its length, then return that raw value from the property access.
Update (2015-11-16): Jonathan Wight:
Using Realm on a new feature here at 3DR and so far very impressed. Minor issues but on the whole better experience than using CD
