Bolt is a pure Go key/value store inspired by [Howard Chu](https://twitter.com/hyc_symas) and the [LMDB project](http://symas.com/mdb/). The goal of the project is to provide a simple, fast, and reliable database for projects that don't require a full database server such as Postgres or MySQL. It is also meant to be educational. Most of us use tools without understanding how the underlying data really works.
Since Bolt is meant to be used as such a low-level piece of functionality, simplicity is key. The API will be small and only center around getting values and setting values. That's it. If you want to see additional functionality added then we encourage you submit a Github issue and we can discuss developing it as a separate fork.
Bolt is functionally complete and has nearly full unit test coverage. The library test suite also includes randomized black box testing to ensure database consistency and thread safety. Bolt is currently in use in a few projects, however, it is still at a beta stage so please use with caution and report any bugs found.
1. LMDB supports more additional features such as multi-value keys, fixed length keys, multi-key insert, and direct writes. Bolt only supports basic `Get()`, `Put()`, and `Delete()` operations and bidirectional cursors.
4. LMDB is a more mature library and is used heavily in projects such as [OpenLDAP](http://www.openldap.org/).
So why use Bolt? The goal of Bolt is provide a simple, fast data store that is easily integrated into Go projects. The library does not require CGO so it is compatible with `go get` and you can easily build static binaries with it. We are not accepting additional functionality into the library so the API and file format are stable. Bolt also has near 100% unit test coverage and also includes heavy black box testing using the [testing/quick](http://golang.org/pkg/testing/quick/) package.
