Hi there!

Thanks for checking my profile. My name is Ewout Stortenbeker, I am an independent software engineer from The Netherlands. I have been working as a software engineer for almost 25 years and have a lot of experience with database development, design and performance tweaking. I am the developer of the AceBase Realtime database, which is a high-performance, low-dependency, plug-and-play NoSQL database engine with real-time data change notifications and powerful query and indexing capabilities. Not just a hobby project, but a full-blown product that many months of development, research, testing and documenting have been put into. Why did I start developing this? Keep reading!

When NoSQL database engines started getting traction a few years ago, they caught my interest. The ease of use and ability to store miscellaneous data was fascinating, and a little strange for a guy with a huge SQL history. While I was working on a new project, I was trying out different NoSQL databases to see which would be the best fit for my requirements. I noticed quickly that they were great with the easy data storage part, but many did not have proper support for offline usage, synchronization, indexing, querying and administration. Another big disadvantage I found was none of them were "plug-and-play enough" for usage in local (offline) Node.js projects. I needed something to work like SQLite - which you can just plug in anywhere - but then a NoSQL version of it.

I really liked Firebase's API and JSON-like storage ability, but since it did not support offline use in its JS codebase, I created a small project that hacked into the Firebase SDK to allow locally caching data, using that cached data when offline, and synchronizing with Firebase once back online. That worked, but as my data grew I needed the ability to query it. That's where things started to become a problem. To effectively query data in performant ways, this required me to duplicate data in different structures on multiple places, and write additional code to add/update/remove those duplicates upon source data changes.

Wait, What?! Duplicate data to be able to query? Duplicate data to create fake indexes to get those queries to return results quickly? And having to make sure all data copies stay in-sync? With my background as a SQL database dev/admin, this became annoying very quickly. I needed something that offered the same flexibility for data storage Firebase did, with the query and indexing functionality and speed SQL databases offer. So... I took the code I wrote for the offline Firebase functionality and started building my own database engine... This was the start of AceBase, born in 2018.

Now, years later, I am using AceBase in countless projects myself and more and more developers are finding their way to it, helping me fixing issues and sharing their ideas. Developing it has been a great ride with many steep learning curves, and I'm not done yet. It has also been an enormous personal investment, because the many months of work were not paid for. By open sourcing it, I am even giving it away for free to the community.

I am now taking this opportunity to allow the community to sponsor my work. If you use AceBase in personal, corporate, scientific or government projects, please consider sponsoring me. This will allow me to continue my work, fix issues, provide support, and share knowledge.

Check out the tiers and perks to see how we can help each other.
Bless you!