If you've ever built a CLI tool, an Electron app, or a local-first prototype in Node.js, you've faced the same question: where do I store structured data without spinning up a server?

The usual suspects are well known — lowdb, LokiJS, nedb, better-sqlite3. I recently built pocket-db, a new embedded document store for Node.js.

I wanted a database solution that offered me:

a single-file database

no native compilation