Soil

Soil is an object oriented database in pharo. It is transaction based having ACID transactions. It has binary search capabilities with SkipList and BTree+ indexes. It aims to be a simple yet powerful database making it easy to develop with, easy to debug with, easy to inspect, ...

To read more please have a look at the documentation

Loading

note The main branch is not usable for existing databases right now, we need to apply a non-backward compatible change. When v4 is released there will be a converter for old databases to migrate. Please load v3 until then

Load it in 64bit Pharo 11/12/13 with Metacello:

smalltalk Metacello new repository: 'github://ApptiveGrid/Soil:v3/src'; baseline: 'Soil'; load. Note: For now, Windows is not supported. Contact us if you want to help!

caution Soil is in an early stage meaning there are might be things missing. It is battle tested as it is the driving database behind ApptiveGrid but you might have different requirements. If so, tell us!

Latest release

The latest release is v3 which you can load via

smalltalk Metacello new repository: 'github://ApptiveGrid/Soil:v3/src'; baseline: 'Soil'; load.

The changelog can be found here

note: Releases in Soil are branches. Loading it with a release tag will get the hot fixes of that release. If you do not want this please use the commit hash as version instead

Development

We use github for organizing our development. You can see what we are doing right now on the project board. An up-to-date list of milestones you can find in milestones.

Talks about Soil

• ESUG 2025 talks
  • "Rhizome - Distribution in Soil" Slides PDF, SlideShare
  • "Soil: Tutorial and Q&A" Slides PDF, SlideShare
• Smalltalks 2024 talk "Soil: an object oriented database for fun and profit" Video YouTube
• ESUG 2023 talk "Soil: a fresh look on object oriented databases" Slides PDF, SlideShare, Video on YouTube
• ESUG 2023 talk "Soil and Pharo". Slides PDF, SlideShare
• ESUG 2022 talk "there's no magic... until you talk about databases" Slides PDF, SlideShare, Video YouTube
• ESUG 2022 ShowUs: "Soil: a OO Database for Pharo" Video YouTube

Soil in Action

If you want to see Soil in action, ApptiveGrid is using it to persist all data. (You can create a free accout here).

• Smalltalks 2024: "ApptiveGrid: solve (business) problems without programming" Video Youtube
• Pharo Success Story: ApptiveGrid - Digitize and Automatize Business Processes
• Demo ESUG 2022: "ApptiveGrid, a collaborative Database" Video Youtube

NEWS

• [ANN] Release V3 Changelog 2025-07-02
• ESUG 2025 talks 2025-07-02
  • "Rhizome - Distribution in Soil" Slides PDF, SlideShare
  • "Soil: Tutorial and Q&A" Slides PDF, SlideShare
• Smalltalk 2024 talk "Soil: an object oriented database for fun and profit" 2025-07-04
  • Video on YouTube
• The Soil Database has now an entry in HAL and is archived by https://www.softwareheritage.org 2024-11-22
• [ANN] Release V2 of Soil, the object oriented database for Pharo implemented in Pharo Mail 2024-08-28
• [ANN] Soil release v1 Mail 2024-04-24
• ESUG2023 talk "Soil: a fresh look on object oriented databases"
  • Slides PDF, Slides SlideShare
  • Video on YouTube
• ESUG 2023 talk "Soil and Pharo"
  • Slides PDF
  • Slides SlideShare
• Soil got the second prize in the 2023 ESUG Innovation Technology Awards !
• 06/2023: ApptiveGrid starts using Soil
• Development of Soil announced at ESUG 2022
  • Talk "there's no magic... until you talk about databases" Slides PDF, Slides SlideShare, Video YouTube
  • ShowUs: "Soil: a OO Database for Pharo" Video YouTube

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