Supported data types

The Aerospike Database supports these native types:

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• Blob
• Boolean
• Double
• Integer
• List
• Map
• String

When setting a value in Java, the Aerospike library automatically determines the best native Aerospike data type for storage:

• Integers and longs are converted to an internal number format.
• Strings are converted to UTF-8.
• Byte arrays are stored as blobs.

Aerospike’s internal typing system automatically converts data types. Cross-language data type issues are handled internally by the Aerospike libraries. For example, an Aerospike String is stored internally in UTF-8 format, allowing Java and C#–which both use Unicode preferentially–applications to transparently interact with Python, which uses UTF-8, and C, which does not use standard internal character encoding.

Note

To avoid format conversion, the Java byte[] type is stored as a pure blob and presented to all other languages as a collection of bytes.

For all other data types (including compound objects), we recommend using Aerospike collection data types (List/Map) or a higher level serialization system (like Google’s Protocol Buffers, MessagePack, JSON or XML). For binary serialization, the serialized value can be used to populate a blob (byte[]) bin.

Caution

For security, cross-language compatibility and performance reasons, it’s not recommended to use java’s builtin serialization (ObjectOutputStream.writeObject()).