Gel

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Schema is the foundation of your application. It should be something you can
read, write, and understand.

Forget foreign keys; tabular data modeling is a relic of an older age, and it
isn’t compatible
with modern languages. Instead, Gel thinks about schema the same way you do:
as object types containing properties connected by links.

type Person {
  required name: str;
}

type Movie {
  required title: str;
  multi actors: Person;
}

This example is intentionally simple, but Gel supports everything you’d
expect from your database: a strict type system, indexes, constraints, computed
properties, stored procedures…the list goes on. Plus it gives you some shiny
new features too: link properties, schema mixins, and best-in-class JSON
support. Read the schema docs
for details.

Gel’s super-powered query language EdgeQL is designed as a ground-up
redesign of SQL. EdgeQL queries produce rich, structured objects, not flat
lists of rows. Deeply fetching related objects is painless…bye, bye, JOINs.

select Movie {
  title,
  actors: {
    name
  }
}
filter .title = "The Matrix"

EdgeQL queries are also composable; you can use one EdgeQL query as an
expression inside another. This property makes things like subqueries and
nested mutations a breeze.

insert Movie {
  title := "The Matrix Resurrections",
  actors := (
    select Person
    filter .name in {
      'Keanu Reeves',
      'Carrie-Anne Moss',
      'Laurence Fishburne'
    }
  )
}

There’s a lot more to EdgeQL: a comprehensive standard library, computed
properties, polymorphic queries, with blocks, transactions, and much more.
Read the EdgeQL docs for the full
picture.

While Gel solves the same problems as ORM libraries, it’s so much more. It’s
a full-fledged database with a
powerful and elegant query language, a
migrations system, a
suite of client libraries in
different languages, a
command line tool, and—coming soon—a
cloud hosting platform. The goal is to rethink every aspect of how developers
model, migrate, manage, and query their database.

Here’s a taste-test of Gel’s next-level developer experience: you can
install our CLI, spin up an instance, and open an interactive EdgeQL shell with
just three commands.

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://geldata.com/sh | sh
$ edgedb project init
$ edgedb
edgedb> select "Hello world!"

Windows users: use this Powershell command to install the CLI.

PS> iwr https://geldata.com/ps1 -useb | iex

Get started

To start learning about Gel, check out the following resources:

• The quickstart. If
  you’re just starting out, the 10-minute quickstart guide is the fastest way
  to get up and running.
• Gel Cloud 🌤️. The best
  most effortless way to host your Gel database in the cloud.
• The interactive tutorial. For a
  structured deep-dive into the EdgeQL query language, try the web-based
  tutorial— no need to install anything.

• The docs. Jump straight into the docs for
  schema modeling or
  EdgeQL!

Contributing

PRs are always welcome! To get started, follow
this guide to build Gel from
source on your local machine.

File an issue 👉


Start a Discussion 👉


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License

The code in this repository is developed and distributed under the
Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for details.