Table Basics

Though Genji stores its data in tables, there is no concept of rows or columns. A Genji table is simply a collection of documents.

Each document is assigned to a primary key, which is a unique identifier.

The order in which documents are returned when reading a table is not guaranteed unless sorted explicitly.

Unlike relational databases, tables are schemaless, there is no need to specify a schema when creating one. This means that, by default, documents stored in a table can be completely different from one another. Optionally, it is possible to define constraints on a list of fields, to control their type, if they are required or not, if they can be null, etc. for every document of a table.

To create a table with no constraints, use the CREATE TABLE command.

CREATE TABLE teams;

This will create a table teams that can hold any document. An auto-incrementing primary key will be generated every time a document is inserted.

Creating a table with constraints uses a notation that is close to other relational databases.

CREATE TABLE users (
    id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    name TEXT NOT NULL,
    age INTEGER
    address.zipCode TEXT
)

This will create a table users with the following constraints:

• All documents must have a non-empty id field, whose type can be converted to an integer. This field will be used as the primary key of the table and will be stored as an integer.
• All documents must have a non-empty name field that can be converted to TEXT.
• If a document has an age field, it will be converted to an integer.
• If a document has an address field and its value is a document with a zipCode field, then its value will be converted to TEXT. Note that this constraint uses field references.

Unlike relational databases though, a document doesn’t have to contain only the fields described in the constraint list. A constraint only applies to its associated field.

CREATE TABLE will return an error if the table already exists.

To remove a table and all of its content, use the DROP TABLE command:

DROP TABLE users

This will remove the users table and all of its documents. If DROP TABLE is called on a non-existing table, it will return an error.