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Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

Hell yeah. This is what I've wanted ever since I first learned about Apple's CoreData.

This seems great. I have a highly interrelated data model (think parsed natural language text with annotations), and writing SQL to keep all of that data aligned and synced is a pain with an ORM.

Am I right in imagining this works similarly to how Apple's CoreData does? It lets you build objects linked to each other but handles all of the joining and syncing of the data for you to keep the object model in mind.

In the same vein will you be creating a Swift client?

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I'm not too familiar with the CoreData API, but from a quick googling it seems like this is some sort of an ORM on top of SQLite.

We position EdgeDB as a database server, not a library, partly because you can interact with it from different programming languages. But we design our client library with focus on API composability, check out our edgedb-js library for example: https://www.edgedb.com/docs/clients/01_js/index

As for the Swift, it would be great to have it one day. I have a counter question: how many of you use Swift to write server-side logic?

Right, but conceptually the way you interact with it is the same. I'm not trying to belittle what you've done. I'm in fact very excited about it.

And EdgeDB is very needed because it's just an Apple library currently.

Conceptually, my impression is that EdgeDb is relational tables (highly-typed) queried, combined, and modeled as nodes in a graph/tree. Is that conceptually correct?

I don't, but I would like to if I could deploy Swift code to Azure. I love Swift as a language.

That's correct! Though that's true for most ORMs as well, and we try not to get lumped into the ORM bucket...too much bad blood.

I've dabbled with CoreData myself and it's a phenomenal API. Apple comes up with a lot of great stuff. In fact, given how much server-side Swift there is these days, we'll have to look into building a Swift client library at some point.

I completely understand, but your product and CoreData go so much further than what ORMs can. It's fulfilling the promise of ORMs and relational databases that's only existed in people's minds up until recently.

I hope EdgeDB is immediately recognized for the value it will bring to developer productivity everywhere!

Now we just need an SQLite version of EdgeQL (perhaps EQLite) for local data and it can completely replace SQL in my life.

Would also love to try this in Swift!

Swift has a family of Docker containers and an (admittedly modest) ecosystem of backend frameworks. You can definitely run it on Azure :)

I know you can, but I'm talking about it being a 1st class citizen.

Why position it as a database server if you could position it as something else, like an interface server? Just curious.

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