Introduction
Technical documentation for NetlyDB: an embedded document database for .NET that runs inside your application's process, with optional modules for management, HTTP and AI access, and replication.
What NetlyDB is
NetlyDB is a library you add to a .NET 10 application. It stores documents (your C# objects, or flexible JSON-like data) and files (any binary content with queryable metadata) in a directory you choose, and answers queries through LINQ, filter strings, and full-text and vector indexes. There is no database server to install: the engine runs in your process and your code calls it directly.
NetlyDB keeps each collection's data in memory and records every change on disk in a checksummed write-ahead log and periodic snapshots. At startup it rebuilds each collection from its last snapshot and the log. That makes it a fit for data that fits comfortably in the memory of the machine running the application; larger-than-memory data is not a goal of the current releases. See Embedded model.
How this documentation is organised
Getting started
Core concepts
Querying & search
Operations
Deployment
Security
AI integration
Reference
Conventions
- Enterprise marks a capability that needs an Enterprise license. Everything else is in the free Community edition. See Licensing.
- In development marks work being built now, or implemented for the next release but not yet released.
- Not yet published marks code that exists but that no published package delivers.
- Planned marks roadmap work that has not started.
Limitations are stated where they apply and collected on Limitations. What NetlyDB promises is collected on Guarantees.