LiteDB, embedded NoSQL database for .NET

LiteDB is an open-source, lightweight, embedded NoSQL database, available in C# for use in our .NET applications.

It’s an interesting option to add to a project when we need to store relatively small amounts of data, but we don’t want to use a “big” database like SQL Server or MongoDB, nor work with JSON files.

LiteDB is an embedded, document-oriented NoSQL database that focuses on being simple and easy to use. Its API is designed to be similar to MongoDB’s and is LINQ compatible.

In general, LiteDB is suitable for small to medium-sized applications without high concurrency requirements. For example, when you create a console application that only you will use, and you need to save data quickly and easily.

It’s a development entirely done in C#, with no external dependencies. It has been optimized to be very lightweight; the complete file is less than 450Kb.

On the other hand, the same project provides a small tool, LiteDB Studio, to manage the data we have stored in the database.

How to Use LiteDB

We can add the library to a .NET project easily, through the corresponding Nuget package.

Now we can use LiteDB in our project. For example, suppose we have a Customer class with the following structure.

public class Customer
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
    public string[] Phones { get; set; }
    public bool IsActive { get; set; }
}

This is how we could perform operations on the database.

using LiteDB;

// open the database (or create it if it does not exist)
var db = new LiteDatabase("myDatabase.db");

// get a collection of documents
var collection = db.GetCollection("users");

// add a new document
var customer = new Customer
{ 
	Name = "John Doe", 
	Phones = new string[] { "8000-0000", "9000-0000" }, 
	Age = 39,
	IsActive = true
};   
collection.Insert(user);

// update a document
customer.Name = "Joana Doe";
col.Update(customer);

We could also work directly with BsonDocuments (which I don’t particularly recommend) as follows.

using LiteDB;

// open the database (or create it if it does not exist)
var db = new LiteDatabase("myDatabase.db");

// get a collection of documents
var collection = db.GetCollection("users");

// add a new document
var user = new BsonDocument
{
    { "name", "John Doe" },
    { "age", 30 },
    { "email", "[email protected]" }
};

collection.Insert(user);