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Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

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Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#31

Post by GeorgeCurtis »

elpalek wrote: post #27
GeorgeCurtis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're going to use BM25. Currently it is just dense search. Coming very soon

have you thought about SPALDE models? ex: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10086

Looks really interesting, I'll have a proper read. What would be your reasoning to incorporate this if we already have vector functionality and semantic search?

Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#32

Post by GeorgeCurtis »

lillecarl wrote: post #23
GeorgeCurtis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we just started off as a side project and thought the name fitted well. With the strands, graph type structure, connections... We didn't think of getting people to use it until we found it was solving a real pain point for people, so weren't worried about trademarks or names. There was no other helix db so that was good enough for us at the time.

It's not the end of the world, just me being a bit grumpy. I mean it when I say good luck! :)

Thank you :)

Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#33

Post by GeorgeCurtis »

tavianator wrote: post #30
GeorgeCurtis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we just started off as a side project and thought the name fitted well. With the strands, graph type structure, connections... We didn't think of getting people to use it until we found it was solving a real pain point for people, so weren't worried about trademarks or names. There was no other helix db so that was good enough for us at the time.

> There was no other helix db https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(database)

There was no active one. We saw this and thought it would be a nice nod to history. We've actually spoken to some developers at apple who thought this was really neat :)

Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#34

Post by GeorgeCurtis »

mdaniel wrote: post #22

> so much easier that it’s worth a bit of a learning curve I think you misspelled "vendor lock in"

You can literally use us for free haha. There's not a language that properly encapsulates graph and vector functionality, so we needed to make our own. Also, we thought it was dumb that query languages weren't type-safe... So we changed that

Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#36

Post by GeorgeCurtis »

Attummm wrote: post #35

It sounds very intriguing indeed. However, the README makes some claims. Are there any benchmarks to support them? > Built for performance we're currently 1000x faster than Neo4j, 100x faster than TigerGraph

Those were actual benchmarks that we run, we didn't get a chance to write them out properly before posting. I'll get on it now and notify by replying to this comment when they're on the readme :)

Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#38

Post by tmpfs »

This is very interesting, are there any examples of interacting with LLMs? If the queries are compiled and loaded into the database ahead of time the pattern of asking an LLM to generate a query from a natural language request seems difficult because current LLMs aren't going to know your query language yet and compiling each query for each prompt would add unnecessary overhead.

Re: Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

#40

Post by GeorgeCurtis »

basonjourne wrote: post #28

why not surrealdb?

General consensus is it's really slow, I like the concept of surreal though. Our first, and extremely bare bones, version of the graph db was 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than surreal (we haven't run benchmarks against surreal recently, but I'll put them here when we're done)
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