Web Development with Node and Express

Chapter 13. Persistence

All but the simplest websites and web applications are going to require persistence of some kind; that is, some way to store data that’s more permanent than volatile memory, so that your data will survive server crashes, power outages, upgrades, and relocations. In this chapter, we’ll be discussing the options available for persistence, with a focus on document databases.

Filesystem Persistence

One way to achieve persistence is to simply save data to so-called “flat files” (“flat” because there’s no inherent structure in a file: it’s just a sequence of bytes). Node makes filesystem persistence possible through the fs (filesystem) module.

Filesystem persistence has some drawbacks. In particular, it doesn’t scale well: the minute you need more than one server to meet traffic demands, you will run into problems with filesystem persistence, unless all of your servers have access to a shared filesystem. Also, because flat files have no inherent structure, the burden of locating, sorting, and filtering data will be on your application. For these reasons, you should favor databases over filesystems for storing data. The one exception is storing binary files, such as images, audio files, or videos. While many databases can handle this type of data, they rarely do so more efficiently than a filesystem (though information about the binary files is usually stored in a database to enable searching, sorting, and filtering).

If you do need to store binary data, keep in mind ...