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Comment by samhw | Hacker News Reader

Wait, it stores the data in Postgres? So this is essentially a data model on Postgres?

FWIW, I do think there's a space in the market for a thin wrapper over Postgres (or MySQL) which would automate certain optimisations such as whether to index a particular table. It always struck me as perverse that that optimisation was delegated to the developer, when it's no more subjective or application-specific than a thousand other automated optimisations the engine makes. I'd be really interested if your project covered that.

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It's built on Postgres, but it isn't a _thin_ wrapper. We lean hard into Postgres query machinery and type system in order to pull off EdgeQL and graph-relational efficiently.

Ah, OK, interesting! I don't have an immediate use case personally, but I wish you guys the very best. Honestly, database space needs way more competition than it has at present.

There are countless permutations of the choices that database designers face, so it's a shame there aren't mature products for more of them. I hope this particular permutation turns out to be a good one for lots of people :)

Thank you!

argh - the database space*

Does this mean that at the end it submits SQL queries to postgres? Or is the integration deeper?

We compile EdgeQL queries into SQL currently, because it makes the architecture simpler and less us run on unmodifed Postgres, but conceptually nothing stops us from targeting the query planner directly via an extension or an alternative frontend that consumes EdgeQL IR direclty.

Ah, this is interesting: so Postgres is effectively a 'backend' for you, in much the same way that e.g. InnoDB is a backend for MySQL[0]?

And you - or hypothetically the end user - could change the backend, e.g. to Cockroach for better horizontal scalability, while trusting that EdgeDB will only rely on Postgres's public API at least in meeting its own public API/contract?

[0] It's hard to make that analogy with Postgres b/c it only has one storage engine, but of course the separation still exists.

That’s exactly right.

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