16 posts tagged with "Announcement"

LoraDB v0.5 is the release where the engine starts to breathe under larger result sets.

The first public releases were about making the model real: an in-memory graph, Cypher-shaped queries, vectors, snapshots, and then a WAL. v0.5 moves a level deeper. It changes how rows move through the executor, how common property lookups avoid scans, and how bindings expose results without requiring every query to become one large JSON payload.

The product promise is still the same: keep the graph close to the application, make the hot path fast, and keep the system small enough to understand. v0.5 makes that promise more practical once the graph stops being a demo-sized toy.

LoraDB v0.4.0 adds a write-ahead log.

The engine is still in-memory and local-first. What changes in this release is the durability boundary: on the surfaces that own a filesystem and process lifecycle, committed writes no longer have to live entirely in RAM between two manual snapshots.

The shortest mental model:

• createDatabase() in Node is still a fresh in-memory graph.
• createDatabase("application", { databaseDir: "./data" }) opens a persistent container-backed graph at ./data/application.loradb.
• Database.create("app", {"database_dir": "./data"}), lora.New("app", lora.Options{DatabaseDir: "./data"}), and LoraRuby::Database.create("app", {"database_dir": "./data"}) do the same thing on Python, Go, and Ruby.
• openWalDatabase({ walDir: "./data/wal" }), Database.open_wal("./data/wal"), lora.OpenWal(...), and LoraRuby::Database.open_wal("./data/wal") open explicit WAL directories; pair them with snapshot directories for managed commit-count checkpoints.
• lora-server --wal-dir /var/lib/lora/wal turns the HTTP server into a WAL-backed process.
• Rust gets the full open, recover, checkpoint, and sync-mode surface.

Snapshots do not go away. They stay the portable file you can back up, ship, and restore elsewhere. v0.4.0 makes them stronger by giving them something to checkpoint against.

LoraDB v0.3 adds manual point-in-time snapshots.

You can now dump the entire in-memory graph to a single file and restore it later. The save is atomic on rename, the load replaces the live graph in one shot, and the feature is exposed on every surface that the engine talks through — the Rust core, the Python, Node, WASM, Go, and Ruby bindings, the shared C FFI, and the HTTP server as an opt-in admin endpoint.

What this release is not is full persistence. There is no write-ahead log, no background checkpoint loop, no continuous durability. A snapshot is exactly what the name says: a point-in-time dump you take on demand. Data mutated between two saves is lost on crash. That boundary is deliberate — making the explicit, operator- controlled shape work cleanly is the foundation a WAL will sit on, and it closes the "no persistence at all" gap for the workloads that only need occasional checkpoints today (seeded services, notebooks, controlled shutdowns, scheduled backups).

LoraDB v0.2 adds first-class VECTOR values.

You can now construct vectors in Cypher, store them as node or relationship properties, pass them in as parameters through every binding, and run exhaustive similarity search against them. The value type, the wire format, the function surface, and the binding helpers all landed together so vectors behave like every other typed value in the engine.

What this release is not is a vector-index product. There is no approximate nearest-neighbour search, no built-in embedding generation, and no plugin compatibility layer. Those are deliberately out of scope for v0.2. The goal here is to make embeddings comfortable inside the graph model — to ship the foundation that an index-backed retrieval path will eventually sit on.

LoraDB is now public.

It is a fast in-memory graph database written in Rust, with a Cypher-shaped query engine, an HTTP API, and bindings for Node.js, WebAssembly, and Python. It is built for developers who need relationship queries close to their application without adopting a large graph database stack on day one.

This release is the beginning of the public journey: source-available core, developer-first adoption, and a path toward a hosted platform for teams that want managed operations later.

I did not start LoraDB because the world was missing another database with a logo and a query language. I started it because I kept reaching for a graph database in places where the existing choices felt too heavy for the job.

The shape of the problem was clear: I needed a really fast in-memory graph database. Not a graph feature bolted onto a document store. Not a large server that needed its own operational plan before I could answer a product question. Not a database that looked elegant in a demo but became expensive once the working set, query fan-out, and deployment model got real.

I needed something smaller, sharper, and more efficient.