Gel

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What is Gel?

Gel is a new kind of database



that takes the best parts of



relational databases, graph



databases, and ORMs. We call it

a graph-relational database.

🧩 Types, not tables 🧩

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.

🌳 Objects, not rows 🌳

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.

🦋 More than a mapper 🦋

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 a managed cloud service. 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 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 👉

Join the discord 👉

License

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