Introduction
Welcome to the Marten documentation! Join our friendly Discord channel to learn more with us and the community!
What is Marten?
Marten is a .NET library for building applications using a document-oriented database approach and Event Sourcing.
TIP
Marten can be used completely independently of Wolverine within other .NET application frameworks like ASP.Net MVC Core or alternative messaging frameworks. Just know that Wolverine has a lot of "special sauce" for its Marten integration that will not necessarily be available in other application frameworks.
We're committed to removing boilerplate work and letting you focus on delivering business value. When combined with the related Wolverine into the full "Critter Stack," you can achieve very low ceremony, robust, and highly testable Event Driven Architecture systems.
Under the hood, Marten is built on top of PostgreSQL, allowing .NET development teams to use PostgreSQL as:
- a document database,
- an event store.
While still being able to use PostgreSQL as a relational database and all its other myriad functionality all in one system on a database engine that is very widely supported across all common cloud providers or on premise self-hosting. Marten was made possible by the unique PostgreSQL support for JSON storage.
Thanks to that and other Postgresql capabilities, Marten brings strong data consistency into both of those approaches.
Marten is feature-rich and focused on accessibility, and we do that without compromising performance.
Whether you're working on a new greenfield project or a bigger enterprise one, Marten will help you to quickly iterate and evolve your system with a focus on business value.
Here's an introduction to Marten from Citus Con 2023.
Main features
Some of the highlights of the main Marten features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Document Storage | Marten allows you to use Postgresql as a document database. That makes development much more flexible, as you store your entities as JSON. It helps you to evolve your data model easily. |
| Event store | Accordingly, you can also use Postgresql as a full-fledged event store for Event Sourcing. This approach can help you capture all the business facts in your system. |
| Strong consistency | Marten uses Postgresql transactions capabilities to allow you to have trust in your storage engine. That applies to both document-based and Event Sourcing approaches. |
| Advanced Linq querying capabilities | You can filter your documents using the LINQ queries. That's the most popular .NET way of doing that. We also support full-text search and custom SQL queries. |
| Events Projections | Marten has a unique feature to store both events and read models in the same storage. You can write your projections and get flexibility in interpreting your events. Projections can be applied in the same transaction as an appended event or asynchronously. |
| Automatic schema management | We know that schema management in relational databases can be tedious, so that's why we're offering to deal with it for you. Thanks to the simpler storage with JSON format, that gets much easier. |
| Flexible indexing strategies | To get better performance, you can define various indexing strategies to fit your usage characteristics. Document-based approach doesn't have to mean schema-less! |
| ASP.NET integration and Command Line tooling | We provided a set of build-in helpers to get you quickly integrated with Marten in your applications without much of a hassle. |
| Built-in support for Multi-tenancy | Being able to have data isolation for different customers is an essential feature for a storage engine. We provide multiple ways of dealing with multi-tenancy: multiple databases, different schemas, and sharded-table. Those strategies apply to both document and event store parts. |
History and origins
Marten was originally built to replace RavenDB inside a very large web application that was suffering stability and performance issues. The project name Marten came from a quick Google search one day for "what are the natural predators of ravens?" -- which led to us to use the marten as our project codename and avatar.
The Marten project was publicly announced in late 2015 and quickly gained a solid community of interested developers. An event sourcing feature set was added, which proved popular with our users. Marten first went into a production system in 2016 and has been going strong ever since.
At this point, we believe that Marten is the most robust and capable Event Sourcing solution in the .NET ecosystem, and the accompanying Document Database feature set is relatively complete. Likewise, the greater PostgreSQL community has grown since we started Marten.