Glossary

List of FerretDB terminologies

This section contains a list of common terminologies related to FerretDB.

A

aggregation

A way of processing documents in a collection and passing them through various operations or stages. See list of supported aggregation operations and commands here.

aggregation pipeline

A set of operators that lets you perform complex operations that aggregate and summarize values. See list of supported aggregation pipeline operators here.

B

Beacon

The telemetry service of FerretDB. See telemetry for more details.

BSON

BSON is a serialized binary file format for storing JSON-like documents.

BSON types

The list of types that the BSON format supports. BSON offers support for additional data types compared to JSON, such as timestamp, date, ObjectId, and binary.

C

collection

A group of documents in a non-relational database. It is comparable to a table in a relational database.

CRUD

The four basic operations of a database: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. See Basic FerretDB CRUD operations here.

D

database

An organized repository for collections containing its own sets of documents, and data.

database command

The set of commands in FerretDB. For more information, see supported commands for more details.

document

A record in a collection that comprises key-value pairs. See Documents for more.

dot notation

Dot notation is used to reference or access the elements in an array or in an embedded document. See dot notation for more details.

F

field

Similar to columns in a relational database. They are represented as field name-value pairs and describe the kind of data in a document.

I

index

A data structure used for identifying and querying records in a collection. It helps to limit the number of documents to search through or inspect in a collection. Examples include _id index, user-defined index, hashed index, and partial index. See Indexes for more.

J

JSON

An acronym for JavaScript Object Notation. It is a structured data format with human-readable text to store data objects composed of attribute-value pairs.

JSONB

JSONB is a data type of PostgreSQL that stores JSON data as a decomposed binary format.

ObjectId

A defining 12-byte type that ensures singularity and uniques within a collection and are used to represent the default values for the _id fields.

operator

A keyword that starts with a $ character to query, update, or transform data.

O

Operation modes

FerretDB utilizes operation modes to define its approach in handling incoming requests, serving purposes such as testing, debugging, and bug reporting. By default, FerretDB operates in normal mode. See Operation modes for more details.

P

primary key

An immutable identifier for a record. The primary key of a documents is stored in the _id field, which typically contains the ObjectId.

proxy

Proxy is any MongoDB-compatible database that is running in parallel with FerretDB. It’s used to test differences between FerretDB and other databases. See Operation modes for more details.

PostgreSQL

An open source relational database. FerretDB uses PostgreSQL as a database engine.

S

SQLite

SQLite is a self-contained, serverless system ideal for lightweight applications. FerretDB now offers SQLite backend support.