DAC developers Edgedb announced that they have renamed the project to gel and released a significant update – gel 6.0. This decision was made to eliminate any misleading connotations associated with the word “EDGE”, which could lead to misconceptions about the project being specifically for edge computing or graph-oriented databases. The rebranding only affected the branding elements, while the project’s structure, goals, and team remained unchanged. However, utilities and libraries in the new release were renamed, but backward compatibility was maintained through symbolic links and aliases.
Gel is a project that serves as a superstructure over PostgreSQL, providing a relational and graph data model along with EDGEQL queries optimized for hierarchical data. The code is primarily written in Python and Rust, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Client libraries are available for various languages including python, Go, Rust, .net, elixir, and typescript/javascript. The project also includes command line tools for managing the DBMS and interactive queries.
Gel utilizes a declarative system based on object types rather than a table-based data model. Links are used to establish connections between types instead of external keys, allowing one object to be used as a property of another. The Gel Object Scheme supports features such as strict typing, property constraints, calculated properties, and stored procedures. It also enables mixing of schemes, binding properties from different objects, and integrated JSON support. Indexes can be utilized to enhance query processing performance.
The project offers built-in tools for schema migration, where changes are stored in a separate ESDL file. By executing the “Gel Migration Create” command, the DBMS can analyze scheme differences and generate a script to transition to the new scheme interactively. The change history of the schema is automatically tracked to facilitate seamless migrations.