IndexedDB provides a way for you to store large amounts of data on your user’s browser. Any application that needs to send a lot of data over the wire could greatly benefit from being able to store that data on the client instead. Of course storage is only part of the equation. IndexedDB also provides a powerful indexed based searching API to retrieve the data you need.
You may wonder how IndexedDB differs from other storage mechanisms?
Cookies are extremely well supported, but have legal implications and limited storage space. Also – they are sent back and forth to the server with every request, completely negating the benefits of client-side storage.
Local Storage is also very well supported, but limited in terms of the total amount of storage you can use. Local Storage doesn’t provide a true “search” API as data is only retrieved via key values. Local Storage is great for “specific” things you may want to store, for example, preferences, whereas IndexedDB is better suited for Ad Hoc data (much like a database).
Before we go any further though, let’s have an honest talk about the state of IndexedDB in terms of browser support. As a specification, IndexedDB is currently a Candidate Recommendation. At this point the folks behind the specification are happy with it but are now looking for feedback from the developer community. The specification may change between now and the final stage, W3C Recommendation. In general, the browsers that support IndexedDB now all do in a fairly consistent manner, but developers should be prepared to deal with prefixes and take note of updates in the future.