BetterJSONStorage 1.2

An optimized tinyDB storage extension

Introduction

BetterJSONStorage is a faster ‘Storage Type’ for TinyDB. It uses the faster Orjson library for parsing the JSON and BLOSC for compression.

Parsing, compressing, and writing to the file is done by a seperate thread so reads don’t get blocked by slow fileIO. Smaller filesizes result in faster reading and writing (less diskIO). Even Reading is all done from memory.

These optimizations result in much faster reading and writing without loss of functionality.

A goal for the BetterJSONStorage project is to provide a drop in replacement for the default JSONStorage.

An example of how to implement BetterJSONStorage can be found below. Anything else can be found in the TinyDB docs.

Installing BetterJSONStorage

Install BetterJSONStorage from PyPi.

pip install BetterJSONStorage

Usage

context Manager

from pathlib import Path
from tinydb import TinyDB
from BetterJSONStorage import BetterJSONStorage

path = Path('relative/path/to/file.db')

with TinyDB(path, storage=BetterJSONStorage) as db:
    db.insert({'int': 1, 'char': 'a'})
    db.insert({'int': 1, 'char': 'b'})

extra

one difference from TinyDB default JSONStorage is that BetterJSONStorage is ReadOnly by default. use acces_mode=’r+’ if you want to write as well.

All arguments except for the storage and acces_mode argument are forwarded to the underlying storage. You can use this to pass additional keyword arguments to orjson.dumps(…) method.

For all options see the orjson documentation.

with TinyDB('file.db', option=orjson.OPT_NAIVE_UTC, storage=BetterJSONStorage) as db:

performance

The benchmarks are done on fixtures of real data:

For now only storage numbers are available but preliminary testing shows at least 5x faster reads and writes for large inserts or updates. When doing a lot of smaller operations, the gap widens tremendously. We have seen 200x faster on some workloads.

• citm_catalog.json, 1.7MiB, concert data, containing nested dictionaries of strings and arrays of integers, indented.

• canada.json, 2.2MiB, coordinates of the Canadian border in GeoJSON format, containing floats and arrays, indented.

• twitter.json, 631.5KiB, results of a search on Twitter for “一”, containing CJK strings, dictionaries of strings and arrays of dictionaries, indented.

data can be found here.

The exact same code is used for both BetterJSONStorage and the default JSONStorage. BetterJSONStorage is faster in almost* all situations and uses significantly less space on disk.

citm_catalog.json

storage used

storage	used storage in kb	vs. BetterJSONStorage
BetterJSONStorage	83.3	1x
default JSONStorage	540	6.48x

canada.json

storage used

storage	used storage in kb	vs. BetterJSONStorage
BetterJSONStorage	1572	1x
default JSONStorage	2150	1.36x

twitter.json

storage used

storage	used storage in kb	vs. BetterJSONStorage
BetterJSONStorage	155	1x
default JSONStorage	574	3.7x