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Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust
- satvikpendem 7mo agoThere seem to be a lot of these, how does it compare to Helix DB for example? Also, why would you ever want to query a database with GraphQL, for which it was explicitly not made for that purpose?
- adsharma 7mo agoThere are 25 graph databases all going me too in the AI/LLM driven cycle. Writing it in Rust gets visibility because of the popularity of the language on HN. Here's why we are not doing it for LadybugDB. Would love to explore a more gradual/incremental path. Also focusing on just one query language: strongly typed cypher. https://github.com/LadybugDB/ladybug/discussions/141 https://github.com/LadybugDB/ladybug/discussions/141
- tadfisher 7mo agoIs LadybugDB not one of these 25 projects?
- adsharma 7mo agoLadybugDB is backed by this tech (I didn't write it) https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2023/kuzu-graph-database-management-system.html https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2023/kuzu-graph-database-management-... You can judge for yourself what work has been done in the last 5 months. Many short videos here. New open source contributors who I didn't know before ramping up. https://youtube.com/@ladybugdb https://youtube.com/@ladybugdb
- wartywhoa23 7mo agoThose 25 are me too; this one is a me as well /s.
- Sytten 7mo agoI really wish people would stop using the language as an argument and that commenter would also move on to a more interesting debate. In your discussion the first comment from an ex kuzu dev made an excellent point that rust for databases in an excellent language to ship faster with confidence while reducing real problems of concurrency and corruption. At some point it becomes intellectual dishonesty to dismiss a language because of vibes instead of merit.
- adsharma 7mo agoI didn't dismiss the language. I called it a north star. Rust is still the best option if you desire memory safety. But rewriting a complex working piece of software in Rust is not trivial. Having an incremental path (where only parts are rewritten in Rust and compatible with C++ code) would be a good path to get there. Also open to new code and extensions getting written in Rust.
- pjmlp 7mo agoGood decision, as proven multiple times, it is the product not the programming language, that makes the customers.
- Aurornis 7mo agoDoes anyone have any experience with this DB? Or context about where it came from? From the commit history it's obvious that this is an AI coded project. It was started a few months ago, 99% of commits are from 1 contributor, and that 1 contributor has some times committed 100,000 lines of code per week. (EDIT: 200,000 lines of code in the first week) I'm not anti-LLM, but I've done enough AI coding to know that one person submitting 100,000 lines of code a week is not doing deep thought and review on the AI output. I also know from experience that letting AI code the majority of a complex project leads to something very fragile, overly complicated, and not well thought out. I've been burned enough times by investigating projects that turned out to be AI slop with polished landing pages. In some cases the claimed benchmarks were improperly run or just hallucinated by the AI. So is anyone actually using this? Or is this someone's personal experiment in building a resume portfolio project by letting AI run against a problem for a few months?
- gdotv 7mo agoAgreed, there's been a literal explosion in the last 3 months of new graph databases coded from scratch, clearly largely LLM assisted. I'm having to keep track of the industry quite a bit to decide what to add support for on https://gdotv.com https://gdotv.com and frankly these days it's getting tedious.
- measurablefunc 7mo agoThis looks like another avant-garde "art" project.
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- nexxuz 7mo agoI was ready to learn more about this but I saw "written in Rust" and I literally rolled my eyes and said never mind.
- ComputerGuru 7mo agoI think "written by genAI" should be a bigger turnoff than "written in Rust".
- andriy_koval 7mo agoalternative opinion: * it is possible to write high quality software using GenAI * not using GenAI could mean project won't be competitive in current landscape
- quantumHazer 7mo ago> not using GenAI could mean project won't be competitive in current landscape why? this is false in my opinion, iterating fast is not a good indicator of quality nor competitiveness
- andriy_koval 7mo agoiterating fast over quality (e.g. refactoring, tests coverage, benchmarks, documentation, trying new nontrivial ideas) is a good indicator of quality.
- quantumHazer 7mo agoyou can’t iterate fast over quality though. it takes patience and expertise, not a bloated repo like this. every example you mentioned is not something you should delegate to LLMs, unless quick prototyping
- andriy_koval 7mo ago
- OtomotO 7mo agoInteresting... Need to check how this differs from agdb, with which I had some success for a sideproject in the past. https://github.com/agnesoft/agdb https://github.com/agnesoft/agdb Ah, yeah, a different query language.
- cluckindan 7mo agoThe d:Document syntax looks so happy!
- cjlm 7mo agoOverwhelmed by the sheer number of graph databases? I released a new site this week that lists and categorises them. https://gdb-engines.com https://gdb-engines.com
- dbacar 7mo agoDid you generate the list using an LLM?
- cjlm 7mo agoI was inspired by https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24758 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24758 and collated their assessment into a table and then just kept adding databases :) Claude helped a lot but it's all reviewed and curated by me.
- Sytten 7mo agoKnowing if it is embeddable or server would be nice in that table
- cjlm 7mo agoYes, I have the "embedded" kind in there but a dedicated column would be nice. Thanks!
- natdempk 7mo agoSerious question: are there any actually good and useful graph databases that people would trust in production at reasonable scale and are available as a vendor or as open source? eg. not Meta's TAO
- cjlm 7mo agoSerious answer: limiting to just Open Source: JanusGraph, DGraph, Apache AGE, HugeGraph, MemGraph and ArcadeDB all meet that criteria.
- adsharma 7mo agoWhat is open source and what is a graph database are both hotly debated topics. Author of ArcadeDB critiques many nominally open source licenses here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garulli_why-arcadedb-will-never-change-its-license-activity-7437143534249611265-LoX0 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garulli_why-arcadedb-will-nev... What is a graph database is also relevant: - Does it need index free adjacency? - Does it need to implement compressed sparse rows? - Does it need to implement ACID? - Does translating Cypher to SQL count as a graph database?
- pphysch 7mo agoYeah: Postgres, etc. When you actually need to run graph algorithms against your relational data, you export the subset of that data into something like Grafeo (embedded mode is a big plus here) and run your analysis.
- adsharma 7mo agoThat importing is expensive and prevents you from handling billion scale graphs. It's possible to run cypher against duckdb (soon postgres as well via duckdb's postgres extension) without having to import anything. That's a game changer when everything is in the same process.
- szarnyasg 7mo agoThat's a difficult question and I would like to avoid giving a direct answer (because I co-lead a nonprofit benchmarking graph databases) but even knowing what you need for a graph database can be a tricky decision. See my FOSDEM 2025 talk, where I tried to make sense of the field: https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5413-graph-databases-after-15-years-where-are-they-headed-/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...
- takahitoyoneda 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 7mo agoI just spent an hour with Grafeo, trying to also get the associated library grafeo_langchain working with a local Ollama model. Mixed results. I really like the Python Kuzu graph database, still use it even though the developers no longer support it.
- gdotv 7mo agoEver try https://gdotv.com https://gdotv.com with it? Really interesting to see folks still using Kuzu despite the archival status. We decided to maintain support for that reason, it's been left in a fairly stable rate which is fantastic. Might be worth checking out LadybugDB (the main fork), migration is pretty easy.
- lmeyerov 7mo agoSpeaking of embeddable, we just announced cypher syntax for gfql, so the first OSS CPU/GPU cypher query engine you can use on dataframes Typically used with scaleout DBs like databricks & splunk for analytical apps: security/fraud/event/social data analysis pipelines, ML+AI embedding & enrichment pipelines, etc. We originally built it for the compute-tier gap here to help Graphistry users making embeddable interactive GPU graph viz apps and dashboards and not wanting to add an external graph DB phase into their interactive analytics flows. Single GPU can do 1B+ edges/s, no need for a DB install, and can work straight on your dataframes / apache arrow / parquet: https://pygraphistry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gfql/benchmark_filter_pagerank.html https://pygraphistry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gfql/benchmark... We took a multilayer approach to the GPU & vectorization acceleration, including a more parallelism-friendly core algorithm. This makes fancy features pay-as-you-go vs dragging everything down as in most columnar engines that are appearing. Our vectorized core conforms to over half of TCK already, and we are working to add trickier bits on different layers now that flow is established. The core GFQL engine has been in production for a year or two now with a lot of analyst teams around the world (NATO, banks, US gov, ...) because it is part of Graphistry. The open-source cypher support is us starting to make it easy for others to directly use as well, including LLMs :)
- xlii 7mo agoI wonder if people are using (or intend to use) vibe-coded projects like the one linked. I mean - I understand, some people have fun looking at new tech no matter the source, but my question is is there a person who would be designated to pick a GraphQL in language and would ignore all the LLM flags and put it in production.
- brunoborges 7mo agoWhy is everything "... built in Rust" trending so easily on HN?
- IshKebab 7mo agoBecause Rust is an excellent language that pushes you into the "pit of success", and consequently software written in Rust tends to be fast, robust and easy to deploy. There's no big mystery. No conspiracy or organised evangelism. Rust is just really good.
- macintux 7mo agoWorth noting that “robust” and “correct” are orthogonal. Graph databases (well, any database) seem like an area where correctness particularly matters, and I doubt Rust gives any meaningful advantage there.
- IshKebab 7mo agoThey absolutely are not orthogonal. They are closely related. In any case, Rust improves both. > I doubt Rust gives any meaningful advantage there. Advantage over what? Haskell & OCaml? Maybe not. C++ or Python? Absolutely. Its type system is far stronger than those, and its APIs are much better designed and harder to misuse.
- mattvr 7mo agoIt implies high performance, reliability, and a higher degree of mastery of the developer. (Which may not all be true, but perhaps moreso than your average project)
- foota 7mo agoI added a super cheap and bad embedding database in a project that allows the agent to call a tool for searching all the content it's built, it seems to work pretty well! This way the agent doesn't need to call a bunch of list tools (which I was worried would introduce lost of data to the context), and can find things based on fuzzy search.
- snissn 7mo agoIt's not clear that graph-bench in "Tested with the LDBC Social Network Benchmark via graph-bench" is a benchmark that you made. It seems more robust and reliable than "we built a db and a benchmark tool, and our benchmark tool says we're the best". Just a thing to be careful about. You should just state that it's your tool and you welcome feedback to help make it so that other projects being compared are compared in their best light. Something like that might help, I don't know though it's a hard problem.
- cynicalkane 7mo agoStrong chance the same robot that wrote the benchmark also wrote the sentence to sound impressive. This is another one of the vibe-coded slop projects that are routinely frontpaging HN now. As someone else pointed out, the single author has "written" >100kLOC in diffs per week. It's not possible that any human knows what's in the codebase in any reasonable detail.
- SkyPuncher 7mo agoEvery time I look at graph databases, I just cannot figure out what problem they're solving. Particularly in an LLM based world. Don't get me wrong, graphs have interesting properties and there's something intriguing out these dynamic, open ended queries. But, what features/products/customer journeys are people building with a graph DB. Every time I explore, I end up back at "yea, but a standard DB will do 90% of this as a 10% of the effort".
- adsharma 7mo agoFor starters, LLMs themselves are a graph database with probabilistic edge traversal. Some apps want it to be deterministic. I'm surprised this question comes up so often. It's mainly from the vector embedding camp, who rightfully observe that vector + keyword search gets you to 70-80% on evals. What is all this hype about graphs for the last 20-30%?
- Tsarp 7mo ago"LLMs themselves are a graph database with probabilistic edge traversal" whaat? Do you have any good demos to showcase where graph DBs clearly have an advantage? Its mostly just toy made demos. vector embeddings on the other hand no matter how limited clearly have proven themselves useful beyond youtube/linkedin thought leader demos.
- adsharma 7mo agoIt comes from people who develop LLMs. Anthropic and Google. References below. My other favorite quote: transformers are GNNs which won the hardware lottery. Longer form at blog.ladybugmem.ai You want to believe that everything probabilistic has more value and determinism doesn't? Or that the world is made up of tabular data? You have a lot of company. The other side of the argument I believe has a lot of money. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-mod... https://research.google/blog/patchscopes-a-unifying-framework-for-inspecting-hidden-representations-of-language-models/ https://research.google/blog/patchscopes-a-unifying-framewor...
- caijia 7mo ago[flagged]
- bamwor 7mo ago[dead]
- dramm 7mo agoACID, so let’s see the Jepsen tests.
- ngburke 7mo agoBeen looking for something like this for a side project. The embedded mode with no external deps is the killer feature for me, hate dragging in a server just to do graph traversal. Going to give it a shot.
- Kalizazi 7mo agoWeird project, it's definitely AI assisted, high LoC, but when you see the commits it doesnt look like the average AI slob, and the design is definitely not conventional. JS tests seem fully AI generated thought.. And big difference in quality between some of the ecosystem repo's. Server, Web and memory all seem very well developed, llamaindex and langchain lower effort. I think the main thing this project needs is more maintainers, but looking purely at the features of this database, and the fact that it's Apache2-0, make it interesting, at least for me.
- lvca 7mo agoDo you know if Grafeo ever implemented the LDBC benchmark? I'd love to compare it with other Graph Databases: https://arcadedb.com/blog/neo4j-alternatives-in-2026-a-fair-look-at-the-open-source-options/ https://arcadedb.com/blog/neo4j-alternatives-in-2026-a-fair-... Especially with OLAP queries.