Marten as Document DB

Marten's original focus was on enabling Postgresql as a document database for .Net developers. In Marten's case, this means that instead of an ORM like EF Core where you have to map .NET types to flat relational database tables, Marten just utilizes JSON serialization to persist and load .NET objects ("documents"). In conjunction with PostgreSQL's JSONB data type and its ability to efficiently support rich querying and even indexing through JSON documents, Marten's approach has turned out to be highly effective to implement persistence in many .NET applications.

When a document database is a good fit for a system (mostly when you have relatively self-contained entities and don't need to model complex relationships between document types), Marten can make teams much more productive over ORM or purely relational database usage by:

• Eliminating explicit ORM mapping
• Being able to accept changes as entities evolve without having to worry much about database migrations
• Utilizing built in database initialization and migrations at runtime so you can "just work"

Here's an introduction to Marten Db as a document database from .Net Conf 2018: