Sure, it’s typical for a company to use many different databases. At BigCo scale the right tool for the job trumps developer convenience. But what if we’re talking about a small startup or even a personal knowledge management tool? There you’d want a super-DB that brings many of the features of other databases together in one.

Let’s have a look at what these features are:

You’d think a short list like that would get checked off by at least a few databases. Wrong. Many check about 5/7 but until now I’ve found none that checks all.

Enter Datalevin

I’ve been using Datalevin for over a year now, including in production. It’s very fast ✔️, can run locally (even on your phone) ✔️ and remotely ✔️. It uses a Datalog-inspired query engine that allows for incredibly powerful queries ✔️. Both query engine and its entity API enable graph traversal ✔️. It stores gigabyte-sized blobs without a peep ✔️ and it’s very easy to set up ✔️. In short it checks 7/7 features doing everything I need. If I’d had to pick one database, as is often the case early on in projects, this would be the one.

📣 Shout out to Huahai Yang for single-handedly helming a project of this breadth!

Setting Up Your Own Remote Instance in < 10 minutes

Datalevin just shipped a server mode for remote use. A remote instance allows you to use one database across many projects over the wire. Don’t worry you can still have separate stores for each project inside that database. Here’s how you set it up.

  1. get a droplet running a recent LTS version of ubuntu (I use digital ocean)
  2. ssh into it ssh [email protected]
  3. (if you want to mount a separate hard drive (to physically decouple data from the processing machine) follow the instructions of your hosting provider)
  4. make a user sudo adduser myusername
  5. switch to that user su — myusername
  6. install homebrew sudo apt-get update and paste the install script from brew.sh