Though typescript is pretty fast, and the language is flexible, we all know how demanding graph databases are. How hard they are to shard, etc. It seems like this could be a performance trap. Are there successful rbdms or nosql databases out there written in typescript?
Also why is everything about LLMs now? Can't we discuss technologies for their face value anymore. It's getting kind of old to me personally.
The query syntax looks nice by the way.
How dos Yjs handle schema migrations? If I add a property to a vertex type that existing peers have cached, does it conflict or drop the unknown field?
This looks neat, but if you want it to be used for AI purposes, you might want to show a schema more complicated than a twitter network.
Imho having a graph database that is teally easy to use and can use queries as types/schemas works much better, as long as you have git-like history to save your ass xD
I'm sure once that problem been solved, you can use the built-in map/object of whatever language, and it'll be good enough. Add save/load to disk via JSON and you have long-term persistence too. But since LLMs still aren't clever enough, I don't think the underlying implementation matters too much.
A: One of the main lessons of the RAG era of LLMs was reranked multiretrieval is a great balance of test time, test compute, and quality at the expense of maintaining a few costly index types. Graph ended up a nice little lift when put alongside text, vector, and relational indexing by solving some n-hop use cases.
I'm unsure if the juice is worth the squeeze, but it does make some sense as infra. Making and using these flows isn't that conceptually complicated and most pieces have good, simple OSS around them.
B: There is another universe of richer KG extraction with even heavier indexing work. I'm less clear on the relative ROI here in typical benchmarks. Imagine going full RDF, vs the simpler property graph queries & ontologies here, and investing in heavy entity resolution etc preprocessing during writes. I don't know how well these improve scores vs regular multiretrieval above, and how easy it is to do at any reasonable scale.
In practice, a lot of KG work lives out of the DB and agent, and in a much fancier kg pipeline. So there is a missing layer with less clear proof and a value burden.
--
Seperately, we have been thinking about these internally. We have been building gfql , oss gpu cypher queries on dataframes etc without needing a DB -- reuse existing storage tiers by moving into embedded compute tier -- and powering our own LLM usage has been a primary use case for us. Our experiences have led us to prioritizing case A as a next step for what the graph engine needs to support inside, and viewing case B as something that should live outside of it in a separate library . This post does make me wonder if case B should move closer into the engine to help streamline things for typical users, akin how solr/lucene/etc helped make elastic into something useful early on for search.