Document Store

You are building applications with a Microservices Architecture. You are using RESTful API’s and representing the contents of your HTTP requests and responses as JSON (Javascript Object Notation) documents.

How do you most efficiently store and retrieve the data corresponding to your HTTP responses?

• You don’t want to have to translate the on-the-wire representation of an entity into another form just to store it in a database.

• You want to build your solution quickly, and don’t want to have to add lots of additional libraries or code to manipulate a database.

Store your JSON documents in a data store that is designed to quickly and efficiently retrieve and store JSON documents – a Document Store.

In a microservice, the requests and responses that for the values accepted and returned by the microservice are most commonly presented as JSON values. JSON has emerged as the lingua-franca of REST, quickly eclipsing and replacing XML for most service schemas. When a resource is thus represented naturally by a JSON document developers want to use the most efficient database they can for storing and retrieving that information. Increasingly, this choice is a Document Store such as MongoDB or CouchDB.

For instance, in MongoDB the basic construct is a collection of JSON documents – and adding a JSON document to that collection is as simple as obtaining a reference to the collection and calling an add method. This type of simplicity is what makes this approach attractive to developers building microservices in Javascript.