Top all-time · #729
Gel
Company blog · edgedb.com/blogprogrammingdata
Gel is the company blog at edgedb.com, writing about programming and data. Since 2015, 86 different Hacker News readers have linked it 223 times, most often “EdgeDB – The post-SQL era has arrived”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link edgedb.com (EdgeDB, now Gel) mostly to pitch its Postgres-based database and EdgeQL query language in threads about SQL alternatives, ORMs and GraphQL.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Commenters say to give it a try, that it looks promising, and to look at EdgeQL and the home page.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Gel is an open-source database designed to address ergonomic limitations of SQL and relational modeling, without sacrificing type safety or performance.
Most-linked posts?
- EdgeDB – The post-SQL era has arrived18 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2020-11-09
- We can do better than SQL12 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2021-07-10
- EdgeDB – The Next Generation Database9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-12-13
- EdgeDB – The Developer Database7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-12-24
- /showcase/edgeql6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-08-12
- EdgeQL6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-07-10
- We Can Do Better Than SQL4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-06-05
- Building a production database in ten years or less3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-01-25
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-16
- EdgeDB – The next generation object database3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-14
What Hacker News says?
EdgeDB? Graph database built on top of Postgres so you can do row-based auth as well. https://www.edgedb.com/blog/edgedb-5-introducing-passwordles...
Comment linking /blog/edgedb-5-introducing-passwordless-auth
on “After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL”Submitted Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0 as a story · 947 points
HN discussionA bit of a plug, but if you wish for something that has the Postgres reliability, the taste of nosql but with strong typing and a json output a la graphql, give a try to edge db: https://edgedb.com The team behind it is awesome (one is a python core dev), and it's a FOSS, but they have been using it internally for some time.
Comment linking /
on “Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative”Submitted We Can Do Better Than SQL as a story · 624 points
HN discussionHaving worked on databases, I am not the one to discount the effort that has gone into building EdgeDB. I was but jokingly referring to this: https://www.edgedb.com/_images/_blog/40fc2a2a81483bb0979c96d... Btw, if you folks have time, then EdgeDB should consider penning posts like the ones timescale has been doing for 3 years or so, in its march to industry leadership.
Comment linking /_images/_blog/40fc2a2a81483bb0979c96d4e02b351b44196a18-940.webp
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted We Can Do Better Than SQL as a story · 414 points
HN discussionFound it: https://www.edgedb.com/docs/guides/deployment/index Can't wait for edgeDB cloud!
Comment linking /docs/guides/deployment/index
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted EdgeDB 2.0 as a story · 389 points
HN discussion>> We shall do better than SQL > The EdgeQL language looks cool, and I'm sure querying via a graph structure makes certain problems easier in some use cases. However as much as people have complained about SQL, it's just so ubiquitous there needs to be a very good reason to switch away from it. Not having to write joins isn't really a good enough reason, in my opinion. Oh, it goes much deeper than not writing joins.…
Comment linking /blog/edgedb-1-0
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us as a story · 327 points
HN discussionWe know a thing or two about concurrency and Python. Take a look at our blog post [1] touching on what we do and how. [1] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/building-a-production-database-i...
Comment linking /blog/building-a-production-database-in-ten-years-or-less
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted Show HN: EdgeDB – Next generation database as a story · 224 points
HN discussionIt's a long story :-) https://www.edgedb.com/blog/building-a-production-database-i...
Comment linking /blog/building-a-production-database-in-ten-years-or-less
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted EdgeDB: A New Beginning as a story · 116 points
HN discussionWe've got some benchmarks in an earlier blog post [1]. EdgeDB is designed to do its job validating and compiling your schema and queries and then get out of the way. In other words, once a query was first parsed and compiled, the cost of the next trip via EdgeDB would be similar to that of pgbouncer, i.e. we'll simply send the compiled SQL to Postgres and proxy the results back to the client. This is why our data pr…
Comment linking /blog/edgedb-1-0-alpha-1
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted An approach to optimizing TypeScript type checking performance as a story · 96 points
HN discussionEverything is fully OSS: the database, our client libraries, our CLI. There's a company behind it (I'm an employee) which will make money with a cloud hosting platform, similar to Mongo. We're calling that EdgeDB Cloud and it's still under development. Though you can self-host too on any major cloud. [0] [0] https://www.edgedb.com/docs/guides/deployment/index
Comment linking /docs/guides/deployment/index
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted Building a production database in ten years or less as a story · 94 points
HN discussionWe're working on a more comprehensive explanation of why EdgeDB isn't an ORM. Does EdgeDB do "object-relational mapping" under the hood — absolutely. The reason we try to distance ourselves from the category of ORMs is that the term "ORM" comes with a big bag of preconceptions that don't apply here. EdgeDB has: - Full schema model with indexing, constraints, defaults, computed properties, stored procedures - A query…
Comment linking /docs/edgeql/sets
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted EdgeDB 1.0 Alpha 4 - A new DB with GraphQL support and more as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI'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/in…
Comment linking /docs/clients/01_js/index
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted The graph-relational database, defined as a story · 19 points
HN discussionYeah, we also blogged about this extensively. Here are are some links: Pointed critique at SQL: [1] Benchmarks: [2] and [3] We'll be adding a dedicated benchmarks page to our website soon. [1] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql [2] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/edgedb-1-0-alpha-1 [3] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/edgedb-1-0-alpha-2
Comment linking /blog/edgedb-1-0-alpha-2
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted We Can Do Better Than SQL (2019) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionGraphQL is already supported: https://www.edgedb.com/docs/graphql/index
Comment linking /docs/graphql/index
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted EdgeDB Free Tier and how we stack up vs. PlanetScale, Supabase, Neon as a story · 9 points
HN discussionOn https://www.edgedb.com/tutorial/basic-queries/objects , if I change "SELECT User.name;" to "SELECT User.Name;" the page crashes with, "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred." It crashes on Chrome and Edge.
Comment linking /tutorial/basic-queries/objects
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted Why ORMs are slow – and getting slower as a story · 9 points
HN discussionAn ebook with Easy EdgeDB ( https://www.edgedb.com/easy-edgedb )?
Comment linking /easy-edgedb
on “Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0”Submitted EdgeDB: A Path to a 10x Database as a story · 8 points
HN discussion
