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Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

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Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#281

Post by your_challenger »

rahkiin wrote: post #280
zmmmmm wrote: post #265

Hmm, no JVM or .NET support ... seems problematic for any widescale adoption at this point. Are there fundamental reasons why this is problematic or just not got around to it? (And, is it likely to be possible to build it against standard interfaces like JDBC - or is it too different?)

I wonder this too. The examples I see seem to work best with a dynamically typed language. Is there an example on how this API would work for statically typed languages? Or even languages that don’t like Nulls like Rust or Swift (making everything an optional is not great)

They have a golang client. And there was an attempt to write a Java client[1]. Someone could help ShaileshSurya (the java client maintainer)

[1] https://github.com/ShaileshSurya/edgedb-java

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#282

Post by yhoiseth »

Congrats with 1.0. A couple of things I’m curious about:

1. How does EdgeDB compare to Supabase? Thinking both of realtime functionality and row-level security. 2. If I was to use EdgeDB instead of Django, how would I go about it? In other words, how can I set up a batteries-included, server-side web app?

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#283

Post by larodi »

RedCrowbar wrote: post #97
dudus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first time I hear about graph-relational DBs. I remember back in college learning about graph databases, but since I never touched one I don't remember much TBH. Is a graph-relational database something completely disjointed from a graph database? Or do they share some performance improvements to some use cases? Also does EdgeDB keep the advantages of a true graph database even being based on Postgres?

> It's the first time I hear about graph-relational DBs. This is unsurprising, because we just invented the term :-) > Is a graph-relational database something completely disjointed from a graph database? Graph-relational is still relational, i.e. it's a relational model with extensions that make modeling and querying graph-like data easier. And in apps everything is graph-like (hence GraphQL etc). An important point…

There’s at least one German-Bulgarian company called Plan-Vision that implemented such graph-relational approach like 15 years ago. their VSQL is similarly working on the E/R conceptual level and gets translated (or compiled into) to the underlying Postgresql or Oracle. You also get a neat EcmaScript like language that works with the collections in a graph like manner.

Long before Arango, Orient etc.

The company is absolutely nowhere near to you guys in terms of marketing, but their thing works with more than 40 enterprise clients so far.

So you definitely did not ‘just’ invent the concept. A lot of companies approach the problem one way or another…

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#284

Post by defanor »

> This is why we wrote (and will continue writing) full-featured first-party database client implementations for common programming languages (currently available for Python, JavaScript/TypeScript/Deno, and Go).

Why no C API? Pretty much every language has a C FFI, PostgreSQL's libpq is in C too, and then it's easy to make bindings from other languages. But with a few individual implementations in other languages it's not as easy to use from more languages. Always makes me to wonder about these decisions when I see projects heading that way.

Unrelated to the subject, but the text on the website is #B3B3B3 on #FFF, which is hard to read as is, and violates WCAG recommendations. When overwriting it with a custom CSS, it's visible that headings have weird margins, covering parts of text before them.

While looking for more, I noticed that the website suggests to `curl | sh` things in the introduction, which is quite awkward too (and a subject of light flamewars), adding another barrier.

The brief project description made me to wonder how well it abstracts out PostgreSQL (and how to work with the databases it creates via PostgreSQL itself, if it's possible at all, how to debug it when things will go wrong), but after brief skimming there's no PostgreSQL bits in sight: just a special shell, a dedicated language, its own drivers. Which is a bit scary.

Neither have I found a description of its graph-relational model, how it's built on top of PostgreSQL, how one can be sure that it'll work more or less smoothly, how things like profiling are done (or is it designed to never need explicit profiling/optimization?), is there more to it than PostgREST-like interface abstracting out the SQL bits for DDL too.

Looks like an interesting project overall though.

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#285

Post by hotfixguru »

1st1 wrote: post #50
waterbase wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dgraph.io? How you guys compare yourself to dgraph database?

IIRC Dgraph is schemaless. EdgeDB is schema-first, which gives you type-safety and that amazing TypeScript query builder autocomplete experience :)

Does this autocomplete experience translate into IDEs when using client libraries, such as the Python library?

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#286

Post by einpoklum »

> Powered by PostgreSQL.

You might need to worry about this in two senses:

1. Graph constructs aren't first-class citizens in the backend. Various potential performance improvements will necessarily be missed.

2. PostgreSQL is ok/good for transactional work, not good for analytical work, like columnar DBMSes.

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#287

Post by contravariant »

RedCrowbar wrote: post #23
rahimiali wrote: post #18

Could someone explain what a graph-relational database is? I'm not able to extract a technical definition from the paragraph below: "What is a graph-relational database? EdgeDB is built on an extension of the relational data model that we call the graph-relational model. This model completely eliminates the object-relational impedance mismatch while retaining the solid basis of and performance of the classic relation…

(EdgeDB CTO here) In a classic relational model everything is a tuple containing scalar values. Graph-relational extends the relational data model in three ways: - every relation always has a global immutable key independent of data (explicit autoincrement keys aren't needed) - this enables us to add a "reference type", which is essentially a pointer to some other record (i.e. a foreign key) - attributes can be set-v…

That's awesome. I think you've hit the nail on the head by trying to fix the SQL part of relational databases and not the relational part. It's been a pet peeve of mine for ages that relational databases have been described as inadequate for modelling relationships and graph databases have been described as the solution. You CAN'T fix the problem just by going from n-ary to binary relationships.

How deeply is EdgeDB integrated into Posgresql? Any chance it could be used to query other databases eventually?

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#288

Post by spqrtan117 »

RedCrowbar wrote: post #109
henryfjordan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is EdgeDB run? Is it a separate process from Postgres, or some kind of plugin? Can I run it over an existing Postgres instance? If I build a DB Schema in EdgeDB, can I interact with the underlying Postgres instance using regular SQL?

It runs as a separate (stateless) process between the client and the PostgreSQL server. There was a talk about the details of the architecture on the live stream today: https://youtu.be/WRZ3o-NsU_4?t=5294

So, there is, basically, no way to work with Postgres directly, as well as installing EdgeDB with the use of the existing Postgres installation and its data, right? Feels like a Postgres is a prisoner of the EdgeDB :)

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#289

Post by jd_mongodb »

gervwyk wrote: post #32
RedCrowbar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(EdgeDB CTO here) In a classic relational model everything is a tuple containing scalar values. Graph-relational extends the relational data model in three ways: - every relation always has a global immutable key independent of data (explicit autoincrement keys aren't needed) - this enables us to add a "reference type", which is essentially a pointer to some other record (i.e. a foreign key) - attributes can be set-v…

I’ve always wished for MongoDB to have a “deepFind”, so that when I fetch a document, it will fetch the nested relations also instead of doing an aggression to do the lookup. Feel like if their objectID only included a collection name reference then somehow it should be possible. Perhaps a depth parameter would use be useful for more relational data. Congrats on the milestone! Will definitively have a look at edgeDB.

MongoDB $graphLookup might do what you want.

From the docs:

Performs a recursive search on a collection, with options for restricting the search by recursion depth and query filter.

https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregati...

Re: Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

#290

Post by ifdefdebug »

larodi wrote: post #283
RedCrowbar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the first time I hear about graph-relational DBs. This is unsurprising, because we just invented the term :-) > Is a graph-relational database something completely disjointed from a graph database? Graph-relational is still relational, i.e. it's a relational model with extensions that make modeling and querying graph-like data easier. And in apps everything is graph-like (hence GraphQL etc). An important point…

There’s at least one German-Bulgarian company called Plan-Vision that implemented such graph-relational approach like 15 years ago. their VSQL is similarly working on the E/R conceptual level and gets translated (or compiled into) to the underlying Postgresql or Oracle. You also get a neat EcmaScript like language that works with the collections in a graph like manner. Long before Arango, Orient etc. The company is a…

He said they invented the term, not the concept. I don't know if that is accurate either, but your missquote makes for a huge difference.
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