3 posts filed under embedded.
MongrelDB ships as one compiled binary per platform and one shared library per ABI, with cluster and cloud integrations excluded at compile time, and that shape is an economic decision as much as an engineering one.
A pure embedded engine never has to think about other processes, but MongrelDB is also a server, so it takes an exclusive advisory lock at open, fails fast by default, waits politely when you ask it to, and pushes genuine multi-process access through the daemon instead of through the filesystem.
MongrelDB reconstructs change events from its own WAL and streams committed records to follower copies, so an embedded database can participate in replication and change data capture without bolting on a separate toolchain.
