Ok, but is it gel as in gif or gel as in gif?
EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
11–20 of 126 posts
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#12Co-founder here - AMA.
Congrats on the rebrand and launch! Biggest reasons to use Gel over Supabase?
Good question. We’re indeed similar products.
Gel is somewhat similar to Supabase on the surface—both run on Postgres, both have Auth, and both offer AI features, a CLI, and a UI, among other similarities.
However, there’s a big difference beneath the surface: Gel comes with a high-level data model (abstract types, mixins, access policies) that replaces tables and joins. It’s still relational (and we’re about to publish a paper on that), but it’s more high level, strict, and yet more flexible.
On top of that, we have a built-in migration system (where schema is a first-class citizen), a performance-tuned network protocol, and a query language called EdgeQL, which is like a child of SQL and GraphQL. These are just a few of our “deep” features.
All in all, Gel is a fresh take on day-to-day database development. We cut no corners in trying to push the core database developer experience forward.
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#13Ok, but is it gel as in gif or gel as in gif?
Gel as in gif obviously! :-)
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#14Tried many ORMs to get them to work in SQL, but EdgeDB's was the one that worked extremely straightforwardly, literally without any issues that weren't due to not following the instructions. No bugs, no configuration errors, no nothing. It all just worked. So I think you guys deserve more recognition and credit for what is clearly a very well-engineered product that I intend to use for some of my personal projects.
Have you tried drizzle? If so, what's your beef? (The only one I've had is lack of down-migrations)
Addressing your core question: Drizzle is a great ORM with a tastefully designed API—it's clearly a product of love. But it’s still an ORM, and it’s confined by certain design boundaries that come from being a library. For example, what if you want to use TypeScript, Go, and Python on your backend? Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs? With Gel, you have one data model and a unified querying layer—the true source of truth.
We have a blog post about that and more [1].
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By the way, if you visit Drizzle’s website, you’ll see that Gel is one of their biggest sponsors. We worked closely with Drizzle to ship a first-class integration with Gel. You can use Gel’s schema and migrations, and Drizzle will just work. You can even use the Drizzle query builder and EdgeQL side by side if you want.
[1] https://www.geldata.com/blog/a-solution-to-the-sql-vs-orm-di...
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#15Co-founder here - AMA.
Was the rebrand really just for simplicity and clarity? It seems like a lot of work to change the name when it was already a pretty established toolchain, not just for your team, but, and this is more important, for your community.
I actually think EdgeDB was a far better name. It actually meant something; yes, it wasn't a pure graph database, but it did work with the general concept of graphs and edges. Gel means nothing. Even the domain name: geldata.com makes no sense. You're not selling or creating data, it's a database system/layer.
I've been a true evangelist for EdgeDB over the last two years, but this has really irked me - irrationally so, I'm aware(!), but I just can't see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks here. It feels like it has to have been a result of some legal action or something.
And just as LLMs were starting to catch up with their knowledge cutoff to include EdgeDB too! Now it'll be another two years until they know what you're talking about again. I know, first world problems.
Is the query language name changing, by the way? Or is that still EdgeQL? Please let sanity prevail over at least one thing and don't call it "jel-q-ell"!
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#16Co-founder here - AMA.
It says gel is to Postgres what typescript is to JavaScript, so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel? And is there a story for replication/subscribing to queries for real time updates? Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want t…
In the just released new version we've added SQL support, so now you can use SQL taking full advantage of our data model (access policies, mixins, etc) and the network protocol (automatic recovery on network & transaction error, automatic connection pooling on client/sever).
We'll continue bridging the gap to make it easier for companies to adopt Gel for an existing database. We either will invest in creating a tool for migration, or maybe some more exciting options we're currently pondering on.
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#17> To oversimplify, Gel to Postgres is what TypeScript is to JavaScript. I've been using EdgeDB for years (from RethinkDB and MongoDB before that) and it's my favorite database. I don't need to memorize SQL commands and I get a pretty UI to look at my data if my queries introduce issues.
<3
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#18Co-founder here - AMA.
Was the rebrand really just for simplicity and clarity? It seems like a lot of work to change the name when it was already a pretty established toolchain, not just for your team, but, and this is more important, for your community. I actually think EdgeDB was a far better name. It actually meant something; yes, it wasn't a pure graph database, but it did work with the general concept of graphs and edges. Gel means no…
EdgeQL stays EdgeQL :) I like that name.
I also liked EdgeDB (I'm biased, I coined that name myself). But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers:
"EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?"
There are other minor reasons for the rename, but this annoyance persisted for a number of years and we decided to pull the plug on it.
> I've been a true evangelist for EdgeDB over the last two years
Thank you. This means a lot.
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#19> PostgreSQL's query planner/optimizer is decidedly state-of-the-art
Postgres's cost-based planner is good, but it's a decidedly 1980s design, predating the famous but also outdated Volcano/Cascades systems (used by Microsoft SQL Server and CockroachDB and others).
So much has happened in the field of query optimization in the last 30 years, very little of which has ended up in Postgres, I think. Postgres has gotten parallel workers and a JIT, but the fundamental design is largely unchanged. It's also quite conservative about adding improvements; other databases has had some variation of index skip scans for ages (Oracle has probably had it for 20 years now, and you can get it through the TimeScale extension), but Postgres is still working on supporting it natively.
The state of the art is arguably Umbra [1], a research project by Thomas Neumann's group at the university of Munich, the successor to HyPer, which is now being commercialized as CedarDB. Their analysis of the Postgres query planner is an interesting read [2].
Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future
#20Co-founder here - AMA.
It says gel is to Postgres what typescript is to JavaScript, so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel? And is there a story for replication/subscribing to queries for real time updates? Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want t…
(article author here)
> If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel [...] Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres
Playing nice with the ecosystem is the goal. We started off with more of a walled garden, but with 6.0 a lot of those walls came down with direct SQL support and support for standalone extensions [1]. There is a blog post coming about this specifically tomorrow (I think).
> And is there a story for replication
Replication/failover works out of the box.
> subscribing to queries for real time updates?
Working on it.
> so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables?
Gel is built around its schema, so you will need to import your SQL schema. After that you can query things with EdgeQL (or SQL/ORM as before).