Keys and Values¶

Keys¶

AgaveDB keys are Python str objects.

You have much flexibility in key naming them but there are rules:

Minimum key length is 4 characters. Really short keys aren’t necessary. You will probably thank yourself for writing user:1001:bugreports instead of u1001bg when it comes time to debug or maintain our code. The added space and memory requirement is trivial.
Maximum key length is 512 characters, but such long keys aren’t a great idea because they will consume memory and will be slow to retrieve. Consider using a hash (such as SHA1) to represent a larger value.
Schemas are good. Examples include object-type:id and user:1001. Dots, dashes, and underscores are often used as separators.
Whitespace is not allowed in keynames. Invalid characters will be removed via a safening process.

There are two constraints on values:

The maximum size for an AgaveDB value is currently 4096 bytes.
AgaveDB values can only be str objects. Currently, numeric values are coerced to a string representation. Support for lists, dicts, and tuples will be added in future releases.