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Posted by smiths1999 13 hours ago

Show HN: LatticeDB – Like SQLite but for graph databases(github.com)
We have been using graph DBs more and more at work. I found them painful to work with locally and decided to try and build something better.
129 points | 36 commentspage 2
nrjames 10 hours ago|
Out of curiosity, why did you not fork and build on Kuzu?
smiths1999 10 hours ago||
Great question! Two reasons. One, I wanted to build something on my own from the ground up rather than contribute to an already established large project. For me, it's a better way to learn. Hopefully people find it cool and want to use it. But if the best that happens is it's just a fun project I built then that is just fine for me. Secondly, the data layouts are different. They are very similar in the single-file, graph db respect. But lattice is transactional and row oriented while kuzu is columnar.
threatofrain 9 hours ago||
Kuzu appears to be a retired effort.
ble 9 hours ago|||
ladybugdb ( https://github.com/LadybugDB/ladybug ) appears to be an open source successor to Kuzu fwiw
nrjames 9 hours ago|||
Sure, but it’s a solid foundation and available to fork, which is why I asked.
vorpalhex 12 hours ago||
Thank you for sharing. I think the sqlite-esque local file approach makes sense for a lot of use cases.

What are some of the scales of the data you've been able to test this design on so far?

What was the most interesting part of designing it for you?

smiths1999 11 hours ago|
I did some perf benchmarking with 1M nodes but I'm mostly using it at smaller scales for another project exploring agentic memory.

Most interesting part is a tough one. From a learning perspective the beginning was incredibly interesting because I was spending a lot of time learning about how other DBs work. Even something as relatively simple as writing to disk had a lot more complexity to it than I initially anticipated.

I used LLMs extensively in building this, and the other interesting part was seeing how they failed. I've always been a proponent that tests are no guarantee of quality code, and working with LLMs has only reinforced it. They often write superficial tests. Sometimes a suite of tests would pass, but when I would actually play around with the feature it was clearly broken. LLMs certainly enabled me to build something of this scope, but it was far from "build a graph DB and notify me when you are done"

idle_zealot 4 hours ago||
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useiris 11 hours ago||
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anentropic 12 hours ago||
See also: https://ladybugdb.com/ "DuckDB for graphs"
anentropic 12 hours ago||
...turns out they are compared here: https://docs.latticedb.org/comparisons/vs-kuzu
adsharma 4 hours ago|||
LadybugDB maintainer here.

Couple of corrections:

* LadybugDB has revamped the Kuzu WAL design. It shouldn't be hard to build WAL based replication

* 19ms vs 39us - like the author says these are vastly different systems and the benchmark methodology may not be comparable.

We've mostly focused on query plan optimizations, not so much the micro query operator optimizations.

The 0.20.x end of the month release should have some interesting optimizations.

  * Prepared statements will cache query plans and result vectors. So you don't pay malloc costs
  * SIMD optimizations for filter. More to come in the next release.
lmeyerov 6 hours ago|||
Congrats!

For those into the `pip install ...` flow and kuzu, is gfql: we started around the same time in a non-VC-funded oss manner with overlap in key architectural ideas:

- cpu columnar vectorized engine + optionally the only open source gpu engine mode for bigger graphs / faster queries

- removes the need for a database / file: pure compute-tier engine you can write to parquet/json if you want, plays with parallel reader/writers in simple ways b/c that, and TBD iceberg

- adds full graph analytic pipeline support, eg, for feature engineering in real-time fraud & memory pipelines

- also millisecond/submillisecond times on small graphs like that small 100K edge graph benchmark

Main box not formally checked is streaming. Funny enough, we're designed for GPU firehose workloads, so would be fun to demo and see what gaps are left.

AgharaShyam 11 hours ago|||
Ladybug looks promising after KuzuDB was sunset (acquired by Apple).

However, I really miss the content posted by the KuzuDB team on their YouTube channel.

smiths1999 11 hours ago||
I like the aesthetics of this page. Very clean and visually appealing
SmallUseful 10 hours ago|
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