You can download and install Harper for free using npm and/or Docker or you can spin up a month long free trial using the Harper Studio and coupon code FREETRIAL when creating your instance.
All major operating systems: Linux, Windows, and macOS. However, running Harper on Windows and macOS is intended only for development and evaluation purposes. Linux is strongly recommended for production use.
Many solutions offer NoSQL capability and separate processing for SQL such as in-memory transformation or multi-model support. Harper’s unique mechanism for storing each data attribute individually allows for performing NoSQL and SQL operations in real-time on the stored data set.
Harper's clustering and replication capabilities allow high availability and fault-tolerance; if a server goes down, traffic can be quickly routed to other Harper servers that can service requests. Harper's replication uses a consistent resolution strategy (last-write-wins by logical timestamp), to ensure eventual consistency. Harper offers auditing capabilities that can be enabled to preserve a record of all changes so that mistakes or even malicious data changes are recorded and can be reverted.
Harper operations are atomic, consist, and isolated per instance. This means that any query will provide an isolated consistent snapshot view of the database (based on when the query started. Updating and insertion operations are also performed atomically; any reads and writes are performed within an atomic, isolated transaction with serialization isolation level, and will rollback if it can not be fully completed successfully. Data is immediately flushed to disk after a write to ensure eventual durability. ACID compliance is not guaranteed across instances in a cluster, rather the eventual consistency will propagate changes with last-write-wins (by last logical timestamp) resolution.
Harper has role and user based security allowing you to simply and easily control that the right people have access to your data. We also implement a number of authentication mechanisms to ensure the transactions submitted are trusted and secure.
Harper can be considered column oriented, however, the exploded data model creates an interface that is free from either of these orientations. A user can search and update with columnar benefits and be as ACID as row oriented restrictions.
Harper takes every attribute of a database table object and creates a key:value for both the key and its corresponding value. For example, the attribute eye color will be represented by a key “eye-color” and the corresponding value “green” will be represented by a key with the value “green”. We use LMDB’s lightning-fast key:value store to underpin all these interrelated keys and values, meaning that every “column” is automatically indexed, and you get huge performance in a tiny package.
When using Harper, primary keys are case-sensitive. This can cause confusion for developers. For example, if you have a user table, it might make sense to use user.email as the primary key. This can cause problems as Harper@gmail.com and harper@gmail.com would be seen as two different records. We recommend enforcing case on keys within your app to avoid this issue.
Harper’s data directory can be moved from one location to another by simply updating the rootPath in the config file (where the data lives, which you specified during installation) to a new location. Next, edit Harper’s hdb_boot_properties.file to point Harper to the new location by updating the settings_path variable. Substitute the NEW_HDB_ROOT variable in the snippets below with the new path to your new data directory, making sure you escape any slashes.
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