Show HN: In-Browser Graph RAG with Kuzu-WASM and WebLLM

It is wise to be suspicious - spending even a small amount of time near the "web3" space will make attentive person suspicious of scams and parlour tricks.

I use the network to host the webxr experiences, which are bundled wasm files, from unity. All of the code lives on the blockchain so, in this sense, i really couldn't do without it.

If you are referring to blockchain-specific functionality, then this is largely true, however i have implemented some demostrations of the consensus mechanism being used from inside an immersive space. This is really to illustrate that it is possible, rather than try to sell you a meme coin.

In the near future I expect to be using the ICP for a lot more, however, since it provides some rather interesting technical opportunities. It is wrapped around something called a 'network nervous system' which acts as a sort of administrator for proposals, so your point about abstraction is accurate, but this is the case with any large vendor.

I choose to build on the ICP because it is more secure and straightforward for my particular stack, plus it has a lot of potential, despite the noise. I've implemented webrtc messaging to keep the cost of normal multiplayer data transfer as low as possible, because consensus is expensive and the network runs on a pay-per-use compute model.

I'm offering a new route, outside of big tech, if you don't consider Unity a menace, which i acknowledge that some do. I am taking an admittedly more radical stance, by including the hosting in this.

Hi, glad to help! I'm a DevRel advocate at Kuzu, and have spent a decent amount of time in other database paradigms thinking about these things. I'm familiar with SurrealDB too.

Although I cannot comment too much SurrealDB's exact capabilities and performance at this point, I can definitely highlight that at the data modeling and query language-level: Kuzu's data model is a property graph model (so an actual "graph" model rather than a multi-model database) and Kuzu implements Cypher as its query language, which is already widely adopted in the industry and is very intuitive to write (for both humans and LLMs).

Although Surreal DB does indeed offer an embedded mode, Kuzu is by design 100% embedded, is super-lightweight and can run natively in many environments, such as browsers, Android applications, AWS Lambda (serverless) and we're especially designed to be a VERY Python-friendly graph database that integrates with pretty much all well-known Python libraries. Because of its columnar storage layer, Kuzu can seamlessly read and write different data formats, such as Panda/Polars DataFrame, Arrow tables, Iceberg or Delta Lake tables and seamlessly move data between advanced graph analytics libraries like NetworkX. For anything related to graph computation, Kuzu is likely to have all the right tools and utilities to help you solve the problem at hand.

In my opinion, it's a myth that databases are heavy, monolithic pieces of software, and hopefully, using Kuzu will demonstrate that it's totally possible to have data in your primary store but seamlessly move it to a performant graph storage layer when required, and move the results back with minimum friction and cost. Hope that helps!

Hi Will!

Thanks for taking the time to reply to this.

Now that I have the context, I find what you're doing super interesting, and well thought out. And greatly value the passion you're building it with as well.

I want to clarify, my message wasn't intended as a dig at what you are doing - especially since I didn't actually look into it at all before writing my reply.

By definition, and especially when explained with enough detail, anything that we do couldn't be done with a different tool, in the sense it'd have to be done differently.

What my comment was meant to address was the original comment's question regarding the value of doing something "on-chain". Mainly because it's something that I've been thinking about a lot, being a founder as well in a similarly-hyped vertical.

At it's core, blockchains are a database, and so any high level goal - beyond the composability/interoperability of on-chain primitives through tokens and shared state - can be achieved without a blockchain.

However, there are many reasons to leverage the position of a blockchain project beyond the technical _need_ for a DLT.

The VC environment might be attractive to some -leveraging the network effects of a sufficiently decentralized network, tapping into ecosystem incentives and growth programs, personal alignment with the moral values typically associated with decentralization, personal connections in the industry/vertical, etc.

All that to say; no one asks why you're using a relational database or a graph database with as much suspicion or caution as they do why you're putting your stuff on-chain, and while that makes sense because of the... unique circumstances of DLTs, there's a lot more nuance to it from a business perspective than just asking yourself the "is it a grift?" question.

I guess what i wanted to get across was that ICP is considerably more than a database, but tbh it's a massive rabbit hole, unless you're already into cryptography. I'm impressed by the foresight and scale of it though.

I thinks it's also the first thing i would call an AI governor, and there is a whole liquid democracy protocol that's pretty well thought out, imo

Thanks for the kind words

Hi! Work at Kuzu here.

> would it be possible to use Kuzu to query data stored on sqlite? Yes, we have a SQLite extension (https://docs.kuzudb.com/extensions/attach/rdbms/) that can read data from SQLite databases.

> Could it be viable to have one or multiple kuzu databases per user? What’s the story like for backups with kuzu? You can have multiple databases, but con only connect to one at a time for now. We don't have support for backups for now, but we'd like to hear more about your specific use cases. Would be great if you could join our discord (https://kuzudb.com/chat) or contact us through contact@kuzudb.com, and we can chat more there.