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YouTrackDB is a general-use object-oriented graph database
- gjvc 3mo agosee also https://youtrackdb.zulipchat.com/ https://youtrackdb.zulipchat.com/
- supriyo-biswas 3mo agoI wonder if there's a design decision documented somewhere that makes the existing graph databases like Neo4j, etc. not good enough for Youtrack's use case.
- zihotki 3mo agoThat's a good question indeed. Also I wonder why they picked java as the implementation language.
- rednb 3mo agoLikely because they are a Java shop. All the IDEs they develop use Java, so they have quite an expertise in low level optimization for this language.
- jonathanlydall 3mo agoThey also have C# expertise, but yes, Java is probably the language they have the most expertise in.
- rob74 3mo agoThat's true, although, if you look at them, you wouldn't notice. The only mention of JVM you can see in the IDEs is in the About dialog, and the IDEs install and run their own OpenJDK, so no JVM has to be installed globally. Almost as if they were a bit self-conscious about using such an "unsexy" architecture...
- mike_hearn 3mo agoBundling a JDK with the app is the officially sanctioned way to ship Java apps since Java 9, so for over a decade now.
- Hendrikto 3mo agoThe JDK is too big for every app to do that, imo.
- pjmlp 3mo agoWhich is why there are linking and packaging tools for trimming fat that isn't needed, or even AOT compile the application.
- well_ackshually 3mo agoYou mean a JRE, because the whole JDK contains a bunch of things you're never going to need. Mind you, a default JRE redistribution makes your app at least 100+MB. Using jdeps to strip out unneeded things is a good idea if you want it to get down to 25 ish MBs.
- jamesfinlayson 3mo agoJREs haven't been a thing in like a decade I thought.
- well_ackshually 3mo agoYeah, saying JRE is a bit of a shortcut since you're supposed to jlink & jpackage & jdance &jpray to get a slimmed down JVM released with your app, but it's closer to what would be a JRE than a full JDK
- fsuts 3mo agoDate of commits shows this project is 3 years old. It’s JetBrains who were synonymous with Java so not a surprise, if was a recent project would have been Kotlin (which this company created)
- winrid 3mo agoProbably worth saying it's a fork of orientdb from like 2010.
- ChrisRR 3mo agoBecause Youtrack itself is written in java
- pandoro 3mo agoNeo4j is a great DB but their license price is egregious for enterprise customers. A few years ago I was involved in negotiating a contract for a small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores) and the annual price was more than the salary of a senior SWE full-time equivalent. See this page for an idea of their prices in 2018: https://blog.igovsol.com/2018/01/10/Neo4j-Commercial-Prices.html https://blog.igovsol.com/2018/01/10/Neo4j-Commercial-Prices....
- brabel 3mo agoAlso embedding Neo4j is not possible, that seems to be the killer feature for YouTrackDB, they even shade dependencies so it’s like a no deps Java library for your application.
- danpalmer 3mo ago> small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores That's ~1 machine. 1 SWE for a database isn't egregious, databases provide huge value, but for that little performance, that's crazy. I can only assume as core count has blown up over the last 10 years, the pricing has somewhat diminished, but still, I'd be expecting a heck of a lot more capacity for 1 SWE.
- hobofan 3mo agoI can tell you from quotes that I've seen, that compared to the 2018 prices listed on the page, end-of-2022 pricing was slightly up per core. We were already well on our way of dumping Neo4J due to performance/operational/architectural reasons at the point, but seeing the quote solidified it.
- fsuts 3mo agoNot just that, if a database company has both a community edition and enterprise then it’s likely the enterprise will get many new features that the community edition will never get. Ongoing enshittification risk.
- adsharma 3mo agoThere are several MIT/Apache licensed embedded graph databases available, including the one linked from my profile.
- denismi 3mo agoDidn't Neo4J pivot away from being a boring embedded DB which you point at a path and then traverse through Node objects, and decide to become some kind of paid platform with a client-server protocol and proprietary query DSL? I remembered it from a uni course (early 10s?) a few years ago for a use-case we didn't end up pursuing, but I wasn't hugely comfortable with investing effort into what I saw.
- ajhenrydev 3mo agoDo they have a doc that says what scale this can operate at?
- winrid 3mo agoIt's embedded. Single machine. But it runs their forum/ticketing thing so good enough for that I guess :)
- td2 3mo agoIsnt youtrackdb a odd name, if its intended as a general use db? Why link it that much to a specific known product?
- ggcr 3mo agoIt's a fork of OrientDB, isn't it?
- jacolbj 3mo agoA successor to it, yes: https://medium.com/@youtrackdb/long-road-ahead-6d648141a190 https://medium.com/@youtrackdb/long-road-ahead-6d648141a190
- brobdingnagians 3mo agoI've always been curious about graph DBs and dabbled a bit in them, but for those who have more extensive experience in them-- are they really worth it? Is it that for small scale SQL is better and graph DBs really only matter at scale, or for specific use cases with highly connected data?
- ChicagoDave 3mo agoI played around with Neo4j and only ever found two domains where it excelled. - custom app security - social media I also think cypher is a brilliant way to query a graph.
- shaism 3mo agoI worked in a startup whose value proposition was largely derived from using graph data and graph databases under the hood. The main benefit is, as the repo even states "Fast data processing: Links traversal is processed with O(1) complexity." So, technically, you can do deep traversals quicker. A few notes: 1. Few use cases truly need low-latency deep traversal on realtime data (>5 hops). There are some well known ones like fraud detection in payment processing and, possibly, social media recommendation engines. But I am not even sure how latest social media engines work, and whether they still rely on graph DBs. 2. However, in practice the advantage is often marginal. With modern analytical databases, or even an optimized PostgreSQL (ltree, materialized views, pgrouting, pg_duckdb, etc), you often get more than good enough performance. In addition those traditional SQL DBs scale with hardware more easily than graph databases. So, you can always use the lever: "Throw more hardware at it." 3. Even Graph DBs don't get good traversal performance under all conditions without hand tuning. For example, there is the "super node" issue, a node with an abnormally high number of connections (edges). And if you still need hand-tuning, you might as well choose something more versatile. 4. The ecosystem of a PostgreSQL and other popular DBs is just unbeaten. With graph DBs, you often prematurely put yourself in a corner that you don't want to be in. Hence, my recommendation. Unless you are really sure that a graph DB is the right fit for your use case, start with something else, and go the graph db way when you have established a true need.
- deleted 3mo ago
- rob74 3mo agoI wasn't surprised that it's written in a JVM language, but I was surprised that that language is Java, not JetBrains' very own Kotlin...
- atraac 3mo agoYoutrack was made long before Kotlin so I suspect the rewrite just wasn't worth it
- rob74 3mo agoTIL - YouTrack was first released in 2009, Kotlin in 2011, so I wouldn't call it long before, but definitely before. Guess I'm more interested in programming languages than in task management tools, that's probably why I have been aware of Kotlin longer than of YouTrack...
- arkadiytehgraet 3mo agoKotlin 1.0 was released early 2016. I can see why YouTrack team might not have wanted to commit using an unstable language, though I can also see the dogfooding angle.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoThing is, iirc Kotlin is mostly compatiable / interchangeable with Java so they could write any new code in Kotlin.
- mike_hearn 3mo agoYou can port files from Java to Kotlin by pressing a button, but Jetbrains has generally not done bulk ports. They leave it up to individual devs to convert a file when it's being worked on, if the diff and VCS history pollution is worth it.
- znpy 3mo agoObject databases routinely go away and routinely come back. Ten years ago I worked with a database called Versant OODBMS (from Actian). I was a junior sysadmin so i was essentially administering it at a very surface level but skimming the documentation (and trying some of the samples) it was very cool that you could pick essentially any random class, implement an interface (and hence a few method) and that was it, you had a database-serializable object. The main issue was really scaling out (as in, multiple machines) but otherwise was a really great database.
- pjmlp 3mo agoYes, POET for C++, for example. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartySoftware/DataCapture-Storage-Reports/page92/POET/POET.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...
- kjs3 3mo agoThat's funny, one of my buddies from college was one of the OG Versant employees (I assume there's not another OODBMS named Versant). That was in the late 80s.
- znpy 3mo agoCool! I used Versant at work between 2016 and 2019!
- saastester 3mo ago[flagged]
- rickette 3mo agoThis is the successor of https://github.com/JetBrains/xodus https://github.com/JetBrains/xodus, but with quite some differences.
- l337h4x0rz 3mo agoI played around with something similar before called typedb. It also does object oriented graph model which was a bit weird at first after using sql for a long time, but once it clicks there's a lot of thing that you could express surprisingly nicely
- marcodena 3mo agois it distributed? It would be awesome to use it with graph neural network due to the O(1) graph traversal
- dzonga 3mo agoThere's also falkorDb (based on redis) to consider [0]: https://github.com/falkordb/falkordb https://github.com/falkordb/falkordb
- vanyaland 3mo agoWorth clicking into .claude/agents/ in this repo. There are 25 agent definitions, 10 of them code-review dimensions.
- iterateoften 3mo agoWhen you see 25 agent definitions, how do you know they are good? How do you know it’s better than 10 or 5 or 1? Is a project with 100 agent definitions better?
- RadiozRadioz 3mo agoWhat is interesting about them?
- gjvc 3mo agosummary * AFAICT, this is not (yet) in active use in production YouTrack, which is still using https://github.com/JetBrains/xodus https://github.com/JetBrains/xodus * the technical leader of the YouTrackDB project, Andrii Lomakin, was one of the main contributors to OrientDB -- see https://medium.com/@youtrackdb https://medium.com/@youtrackdb * YouTrackDB is a fork of OrientDB * this project makes heavy use of Claude Code * YouTrackDB does not use Kotlin * this can be used as a network service (rather than just embedded in a single runtime process like in current production YouTrack), but I've not yet got the docker images working to try. from the blurb YouTrackDB is a general-purpose object-oriented graph database developed by JetBrains, used internally in production. It implements the Apache TinkerPop API with Gremlin query language support and features O(1) link traversal, schema-less/mixed/full modes, and encryption at rest. The project is a fork of OrientDB, re-architected under the com.jetbrains.youtrackdb package namespace.
- jollyllama 3mo agoI hope this doesn't complicate the process of deploying YouTrack on-prem. That's the best part about YouTrack; historically, you can deploy on prem with no backing DB. From the outside perspective, it just stores everything to flat files.
- lvca 3mo ago[dead]