Most embedded document stores make you pay the same price to read one field as to read the whole record: they deserialize the entire value, then hand you the field you asked for. That cost grows with the record. Read one number out of a 128-field document, or one element out of a 10 000-element list, and you've just decoded all of it.
ArborDb is a pure-Rust, typed, transactional, indexed document store built around the opposite idea: store each value as one zero-copy blob and read a field in place, without touching the rest.
It's the 1.0 successor to StratoDb — same typed model and derive surface, a completely different storage strategy.
The core idea: one blob per value, navigated in place
A value in ArborDb is a tree of objects, lists, and scalar leaves. Instead of shredding each scalar into its own keyed row (StratoDb's old approach), ArborDb serializes the whole tree into a single blob in a single engine entry, laid out with offset tables:
