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.

A few weeks ago I wrote about ArangoDB’s specialized export API.

The export API is useful when the goal is to extract all documents from a given collection and to process them outside of ArangoDB.

The export API can provide quick and memory-efficient snapshots of the data in the underlying collection, making it suitable for extract all documents of the collection. It will be able to provide data much faster than with an AQL query that will extract all documents.

In this post I’ll show how to use the export API to extract data and process it with PHP.

Please read the full blog post Exporting Data for Offline Processing.