Glasgow is a flexible, modular, and lightweight .NET library designed to simplify the development of custom in-memory databases, data manipulation engines, and query interpreters. Whether you're building a data-driven application, prototyping a DSL, or implementing a custom query language, Glasgow provides the core infrastructure to parse, transform, evaluate, and manage structured data with precision and ease.
Philosophically, Glasgow is built around the extensibility and clarity. It offers utilities for expression evaluation, query parsing, sorting, filtering, projection, and dynamic typing - all tailored for scenarios where traditional relational databases may be too heavyweight or rigid. The codebase is clean, self-contained, and designed to integrate easily into both small prototypes and large-scale production systems. Glasgow is a rich expression engine that supports arithmetic, logical, and comparison operations on typed data. Paired with a compact and efficient parser and a robust evaluation pipeline, Glasgow enables developers to define and execute queries and transformations without having to build a complete query engine from scratch.
- Embedded Query Language: Build custom data query languages for analytics dashboards, configuration engines, or scripting environments.
- In-Memory Data Engine: Implement dynamic, in-memory data tables that support filtering, sorting, and projection.
- DSL Prototyping: Rapidly prototype domain-specific languages (DSLs) that require parsing and evaluation capabilities.
- ETL Pipelines: Integrate Glasgow into Extract-Transform-Load pipelines for structured data filtering and transformation.
Glasgow can be easily installed into your .NET project using NuGet Package Manager.
The simplest way to add Glasgow to your project is through NuGet.
Open your terminal or command prompt, navigate to your project's directory, and run the following command:
dotnet add package Glasgow --version 1.0.0- Open your project in Visual Studio.
- Right-click on your project in the Solution Explorer and select "Manage NuGet Packages...".
- In the "Browse" tab, search for
Glasgow. - Select the
Glasgowpackage and click "Install". - Confirm the installation when prompted.
If you're in Visual Studio, you can also use the Package Manager Console:
-
Go to
Tools>NuGet Package Manager>Package Manager Console. -
In the console, run the following command:
Install-Package Glasgow -Version 1.0.0
-
After installation, you can verify that the package is correctly referenced in your project file (e.g.,
.csproj). Look for an<PackageReference>entry similar to this:
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
<PropertyGroup>
<OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
<TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
<ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
<Nullable>enable</Nullable>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<PackageReference Include="Glasgow" Version="1.0.0" />
</ItemGroup>
</Project>These examples demonstrate how to persist a GlasgowDB instance to disk and retrieve it later. The database is encrypted using a password for secure storage. This allows you to save the entire in-memory database state and reload it later without reinitializing or repopulating data manually.
GlasgowDB db = new GlasgowDB(); // Create database instance
DatabaseIO.SaveToFile( // Save the database instance to file
db,
"database.glasgow",
"this_is_your_password"
);// Load database from file with specified file name and password
GlasgowDB db = DatabaseIO.LoadFromFile(
"database.glasgow",
"this_is_your_password"
);This snippet shows how to initialize a new GlasgowDB instance and define tables within it. Each table is defined with a name and a list of columns. Tables are created dynamically and are ready to store and manipulate rows of data once defined.
GlasgowDB db = new GlasgowDB(); // Create database instance
db.CreateTable( // Create new table on the instance
"users", // Name the table "users"
"id", // These are column names ...
"username", // |
"email", // |
"age", // |
"is_active", // |
"created_at", // |
"profile_pic" // |
);
db.CreateTable( // Create another table
"products", // Name this table "products"
"product_id", // Here's the column names ...
"name", // |
"price", // |
"stock_count" // |
);After creating tables, you can insert rows by specifying both the column names and the corresponding values in the correct order. The data can include strings, numbers, booleans, DateTime values, and even binary data such as images. The inserted values will be stored and indexed automatically.
db.InsertInto(
// Define the table name where the row will be added
"users",
// Row name array
[
"id",
"username",
"email",
"age",
"is_active",
"created_at",
"profile_pic"
],
// Values that will be put with the same
// arrangement as row names above
[
1, "alice_test_user", "[email protected]", 30, true,
DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(-10),
Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("some_image_data_alice")
]
);
db.InsertInto(
// Define the table name where the row will be added
"products",
// Row name array
[
"product_id",
"name",
"price",
"stock_count"
],
// Values that will be put with the same
// arrangement as row names above
[ 101, "Laptop", 1200.50, 10 ]
);GlasgowDB includes a fluent query API for filtering, sorting, and selecting records. The following example demonstrates how to select users whose usernames start with "bob" and whose age is less than 30. Results are sorted by age in ascending order, and each row can be accessed like a dictionary for reading individual column values.
// Select the following rows from the "users" table
var users = db.Select(
"users",
"id",
"username",
"email",
"age",
"created_at"
)
.Where(Operator.STARTS_WITH, "username", "bob")
.Where(Operator.LESS_THAN, "age", 30)
.Ascending("age")
.ToList();
// Iterate on the fetched rows
foreach (var user in users)
Console.WriteLine(
$"ID: {user["id"]}, Username: {user["username"]}, " +
$"Email: {user["email"]}, Age: {user["age"]}, " +
$"Created: {user["created_at"]}"
);Glasgow is released under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify, and distribute this library in both commercial and non-commercial projects.
Copyright 2025 Nathanne Isip
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