Efficient way for updating a nested array in a document

Mobile Couchbase Lite
1

Hi,

I’m implementing a sensor logging framework and need to save high frequency accelerometer data.
My document is basically structured like this:

{
"name":"sensorlog01",
"data":[
         {"timestamp":4332, "value":"123"},
         {"timestamp":4333, "value":"122"}
       ]
}

Assuming we already have 10.000 measurements in this structure, is it possible to efficiently update the array appending some new values, as you would do when writing to a file or adding new rows to a relational database table?

In Swift, currently I need to copy the array around in memory. Is there a more efficient way than this:

 var newValues = newRev.properties["data"] as [[String:AnyObject]]
 newValues.append(["timestamp":123, "value":567])
 newRev["data"] = newValues

How does Couchbase Lite handle those updates, is the whole array rewritten to the database?

Thanks for advices

2

It is best to put each batch of sensor readings into it’s own document. In general it is bad to append to a document, as it might grow forever. Instead it is better to have lots of documents, and use a view to sort them.

If every reading is it’s own document, that could be too many, but buffering the readings in memory and then writing them out to a document ~ once per second, is probably the easiest on the hardware, and easy enough to work with.

1 Like