What's the catch

[Raynos]

This is a pure JS implementation of leveldown and it's almost as fast.

This sounds really amazing / cool to use :)

[kevinswiber]

@Raynos I list some limitations of Medea here: https://github.com/argo/medea#limitations

Basically, the biggest "catch" is that key set needs to fit in memory. I find this is not a problem for the majority of my use cases, but there are certainly plenty of use cases that wouldn't work with that limitation.

Compaction needs to be scheduled, currently. We're looking at auto-compact semantics here: medea/medea#1.

Medea is fast, because it's basically just an in-memory hash table with entries pointing to the latest value on disk (file, offset). That's guaranteed to be a single disk seek per get operation. LevelDB may have to do multiple seeks, depending on the size of the database (number of levels).

With @kesla having created this LevelDOWN-compatible wrapper for Medea, it really opens up the possibility to reuse the modules that have already been created around the LevelUP ecosystem. It's really awesome.

Happy to answer any questions!

[kesla]

@Raynos I'm really interested in getting any catches out of the way (whenever possible) - so please let me know if you have a project where you'd like to use medeadown and if there's anything holding you back!

[Raynos]

@kevinswiber do you want to leave a comment about key set needs to fit in memory in the README under the limitations section ?

[kevinswiber]

@Raynos Yeah, I thought it was there already. Looks like it's mentioned elsewhere in the README.