One Line at a Time
When you build a database for Event Sourcing, one of the early design decisions is deceptively simple: how do you send data from the server to the client? JSON is the obvious answer. Every language has a parser, every developer knows the format, and every HTTP client handles it out of the box. But standard JSON has a fundamental limitation that becomes a showstopper the moment you deal with event streams.
We chose NDJSON as EventSourcingDB's wire format for streaming data. It's not a new technology. It's not exciting. It's barely even a specification. But it turned out to be exactly the right choice, and the story of how we got there is worth telling.