Show HN: LatticeDB – Like SQLite but for graph databases

I used claude extensively (as well as codex, I finding myself switching between the two every few months). How I used claude varied by the stage. I spent a lot of time initially going back and forth with claude on the idea, figuring out what exists, what would make this interesting, key features I wanted as a user and how to build something around that that made sense as a product.

The initial phases of building I would build out piece by piece. For example, building out the file system interactions I would have claude build a feature and explain how it worked in an educational manner (e.g., like it was a section in a book on latticedb internals). I would then read through the code. This was a great way to learn and build, simultaneously.

In the later stages, where the features and work was more complex, I would spend more time discussing, instructing, and verifying, but less time understanding the actual implementation. I'll give you an example. It's been a long time since I've handwritten SIMD code. I could try and review claudes output, but I am certain I'd miss any subtle bugs that may exist. I found it more productive to assume the code was right and focus on thinking about how I would verify that. Benchmarking, playing with latticedb, etc. were my primary tools for verifying the work. I could run a benchmark and see performance was great. Then I'd explore the test vectors and realize they were trivial, completely invalidating the benchmark results. So we would go back to the drawing board, create a new benchmark set, see results weren't great, and evaluate what was wrong with the implementation. Sometimes features would take days to get out just because of the iteration loop.

Yes! This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit the past few weeks. We are going in this direction at work and I think graph storage is a natural way to think about this.

Great question! Two reasons. One, I wanted to build something on my own from the ground up rather than contribute to an already established large project. For me, it's a better way to learn. Hopefully people find it cool and want to use it. But if the best that happens is it's just a fun project I built then that is just fine for me. Secondly, the data layouts are different. They are very similar in the single-file, graph db respect. But lattice is transactional and row oriented while kuzu is columnar.

Kuzu appears to be a retired effort.

duckpgq is great. I'd say the tl;dr is duckpgq if you have tables you want to traverse like a graph sometimes, latticedb when graph traversal is the primary mechanism of querying.

One of the motivating use cases for me was experimenting with agentic memory. I use latticedb as the backing data store. Finding related memories is traversing the graph (kind of like graph RAG).

Thank you!

I did some perf benchmarking with 1M nodes but I'm mostly using it at smaller scales for another project exploring agentic memory.

Most interesting part is a tough one. From a learning perspective the beginning was incredibly interesting because I was spending a lot of time learning about how other DBs work. Even something as relatively simple as writing to disk had a lot more complexity to it than I initially anticipated.

I used LLMs extensively in building this, and the other interesting part was seeing how they failed. I've always been a proponent that tests are no guarantee of quality code, and working with LLMs has only reinforced it. They often write superficial tests. Sometimes a suite of tests would pass, but when I would actually play around with the feature it was clearly broken. LLMs certainly enabled me to build something of this scope, but it was far from "build a graph DB and notify me when you are done"

Ladybug looks promising after KuzuDB was sunset (acquired by Apple).

However, I really miss the content posted by the KuzuDB team on their YouTube channel.

...turns out they are compared here: https://docs.latticedb.org/comparisons/vs-kuzu

I like the aesthetics of this page. Very clean and visually appealing