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Key concepts

Through this documentation, you'll find a few particular concepts, the most important are the ones defined below:

Session: a representation of an established connection with a database.

Collection: a set of items that belong to a concrete SQL table or a NoSQL collection.

The term 'collection' is used indistinctively by methods that work on both SQL and NoSQL databases.

Result set: a subset of items in a collection that match specific conditions. Use Find() to define a result set. The whole result set can be delimited or modified through different methods, like Update(), Delete(), Insert(), All(), or One().

The figure below illustrates the session, collection, and result-set concepts:

session collections and results

General considerations​

In order to use upper/db efficiently, it is advisable that you:

  1. Understand the database you're working with (relational or document-oriented)
  2. Use Go structs to describe data models. One struct per collection is a good practice.
  3. Try to use db.Collection methods applicable to both SQL and NoSQL first.
  4. Use the SQL builder or raw SQL when needed.