Bulk Document Lookups: Efficient Data Retrieval with ArangoDB

ArangoDB 2.6 comes with a specialized API for bulk document lookups. The new API allows fetching multiple documents from the server using a single request, making bulk document retrieval more efficient than when using one request per document to fetch.

Provided the documents keys are known, all the client application needs to do is to call the collection’s lookupByKeys method:

// list of document keys
var keys = [ "foo", "bar", "baz", ...];
var results = db.test.lookupByKeys(keys);
// now all documents are contained in variable 'results'

Additionally, the server-side REST API method for bulk document lookups can be invoked directly via HTTP as follows:

curl                                                  \
  -X PUT                                              \
  http://127.0.0.1:8529/_api/simple/lookup-by-keys    \
  --data '{"collection":"test","keys":["foo","bar","baz"]}'

Jan compared the functionality with single document requests in his latest blog post.