HelixDB: one open-source DB for graph, vector, and text search
HelixDB combines graph relationships, semantic (vector) search, and full-text search into a single database. AI apps usually need three separate systems for this, which adds cost and complexity. HelixDB removes that overhead, making it easier and cheaper to build AI agent memory.
When building an AI agent with memory, developers typically wire together three separate databases: a graph DB to track relationships, a vector DB to find semantically similar content, and a full-text search engine to match exact keywords. Keeping these in sync requires extra glue code and multiplies infrastructure costs.
HelixDB lets you run all three types of queries against one system, avoiding that complexity. Two college students built it after hitting the same pain point while trying to build an AI memory system using GraphRAG and HybridRAG approaches. It runs on top of object storage (like S3), which keeps storage costs low at scale. For anyone building RAG pipelines or agent memory, replacing three services with one directly reduces both operational cost and the number of tokens spent orchestrating data retrieval across systems.
Key points
- Combines graph DB, vector search, and full-text search in one database
- No need to sync multiple databases when building AI agent memory
- Runs on cheap object storage (e.g. S3), keeping costs low
- Supports GraphRAG and HybridRAG patterns natively
- Open source, actively developed on GitHub
Quick term guide
- search engine
- A website like Google or Bing that helps you find information on the internet.
- infrastructure
- The technical systems that keep a website or app running.
- pain point
- A specific problem or frustration that people experience repeatedly and want solved
- object storage
- Cheap cloud storage (like AWS S3) designed to hold large amounts of files at low cost.
- RAG pipeline
- The full process of splitting documents into chunks, converting them to embeddings, storing them, and searching them at query time.
- orchestrating
- Automating and managing how different computer systems or software work together.
- vector search
- A search method that finds text with similar meaning, not only the same words.
- open source
- Software whose code is available for people to view and often modify.