HelixDB – A graph database built on object storage

Hey HN, it’s been just over a year since we launched HelixDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975423), a project a friend and I started in college. It’s an OLTP graph database built on object-storage, with native vector search and full-text search (FTS).Why graph, vector and FTS? Graph databases provide a natural cognitive model for data, vectors allow for a semantic understanding of the entities and relationships in the graph, and FTS provides more specific filtering. Many AI-driven applications attempt to combine all of these functionalities by stitching together multiple disconnected systems, but even then there’s no native way to perform joins or queries that span all systems. You still need to handle this logic at the application level.Helix started as a graph DB, but we moved to a hybrid graph/vector approach after attempting to build an AI memory system, which led us down the GraphRAG and HybridRAG rabbit hole, where we would need separate graph and vector databases.We knew scalability would be a challenge at each stage of our product's development, however our initial focus this past year was to prove out the product through local deployments and was only meant to be run on a single node. Scaling graph DBs remained a difficult and expensive problem we’d have to solve later. Some common ways other graph DBs solve scaling is by duplicating entire datasets across distributed machines (extremely expensive per node), or by sharding the data.Sharding databases is effective and affordable, however, graph data doesn’t have explicit partitions like relational databases do. For example, sharding a relational DB involves splitting up tables. When it comes to graph DBs, the edges can span across any of the partitions, and hopping across multiple machines when traversing nodes is ineffective and computationally expensive.Replicating graph DBs for high availability and better throughput drastically increases the operational cost of the db a