Key Features

SnelDB is small in surface area but powerful in practice. Here are the highlights that make it different:

1. Append-only storage

Events are immutable. Once stored, they’re never updated or deleted — which means:

• Perfect audit trails
• Predictable replay of past behavior
• No risk of hidden mutations breaking analysis

2. Simple, human-readable commands

No SQL boilerplate. No obscure APIs. SnelDB has a compact command language that reads like plain English:

DEFINE payment FIELDS { "amount": "int", "status": "string" }
STORE payment FOR user-123 PAYLOAD {"amount": 250, "status":"verified"}
QUERY payment WHERE status="verified"
REPLAY FOR user-123

Fast to learn. Easy to remember. Case-insensitive and JSON-native.

3. Fast queries at scale

Under the hood, SnelDB uses an LSM-tree design with:

• Shards for parallelism
• Zones and filters to skip irrelevant data
• Compaction to keep reads efficient over time

The result: queries stay snappy whether you have thousands or billions of events.

4. Replay built in

You don’t just query — you can replay events in order:

REPLAY order_created FOR customer-42

This makes debugging, time-travel analysis, and sequence modeling natural parts of the workflow.

5. Flexible schemas

SnelDB supports schema definitions per event type, with:

• Strict validation: payloads must match fields
• Optional fields: declared as string | null
• Clear errors when something doesn’t line up

This keeps data trustworthy without slowing you down.

6. Designed for AI & analytics

Because events are ordered, immutable, and replayable, SnelDB is a natural fit for:

• Training models on real-world sequences
• Feeding pipelines with reproducible datasets
• Analyzing behavior over time without complex joins
• Auditing decision processes with confidence

7. Lightweight & embeddable

SnelDB is written in Rust with minimal dependencies. It runs anywhere — from a laptop dev setup to production servers — without heavyweight orchestration.

You can drop it into your stack as a focused, reliable event database.

Built-in Playground

SnelDB ships with a tiny single-page Playground so you can try commands without any client code. Start the server and open http://127.0.0.1:8085/ to experiment with DEFINE, STORE, QUERY, and REPLAY instantly.

8. Safety by design

SnelDB is built in Rust, which brings memory safety, thread safety, and performance without garbage collection.

This means:

• No segfaults or memory leaks corrupting your data
• Concurrency without data races
• Predictable performance, even under load

When you’re storing critical events, safety is not optional — and Rust helps guarantee it from the ground up.

In short: SnelDB is designed to be small but sharp — a tool that does one thing well: make working with immutable events simple, fast, and reliable.