Supported data types

The Aerospike database supports the following native types:

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• Blob
• Boolean
• Float
• GeoJSON
• HyperLogLog
• Infinity
• Integer
• JSON
• List
• Map
• Null
• String
• Wildcard

When a value is set in Go, the Aerospike library automatically determines the best native type for storage:

• int convert to an internal number format.
• Strings are stored in UTF-8 encoding.
• []byte is stored as blobs.

The Aerospike internal typing system automatically converts types. Cross-language type issues are handled internally by the Aerospike libraries. For example, an Aerospike string is stored in UTF-8 format to allow Java and C# (which both use Unicode preferentially) to interact transparently with Go and Python (which use UTF-8) and C (which does not have a standard internal character encoding).

Note

To avoid all format conversion, Aerospike stores the Go []byte type as a pure blob, and presents it to all other languages as a collection of bytes.

The Aerospike Go client does not automatically serialize any other data types (for example, arbitrary structs). To do this, the application must serialize the object into a byte array and pass it to the library.

Blobs must be manually deserialized on retrieval. If another language retrieves these blobs, they appear as a regular blob. Objects serialized using another language serialization system appear to Go as a blob.

Note

We recommend using collection data types based on unchanging Go types (such as arrays of integers and strings) or a high-level serialization system (such as Gob), or a cross-language serializer like MessagePack or Google Protocol Buffers).