Concepts
OmniGraph is a typed property-graph engine built as a coordination layer over the
OmniGraph is a typed property-graph engine built as a coordination layer over the Lance columnar storage format. It gives you a schema-checked graph with vector, full-text, and graph queries in one runtime, plus Git-style branches and commits across the whole graph.
The data model
- A graph has node types and edge types, declared in a schema.
- Each node type and each edge type is stored as its own Lance dataset — columnar, versioned, on local disk or object storage.
- A single
__manifesttable coordinates all of those datasets, so the graph has one coherent version even though it spans many datasets.
This split is what lets a graph commit be atomic across every type at once: a publish flips every relevant dataset's version together in one manifest write, so readers never see a half-applied change. See storage for the layout.
Two layers: inherited vs. added
Throughout the docs, capabilities are framed as L1 (inherited from Lance) or L2 (added by OmniGraph):
| L1 — from Lance | L2 — added by OmniGraph | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | Columnar Arrow datasets on object storage | Per-type datasets coordinated as one graph |
| Versioning | Per-dataset versions + time travel | Snapshots across all types at once |
| Branches | Per-dataset branches | Graph-level branches, atomic across types |
| Commits | Per-dataset commits | Commit DAG for the whole graph; three-way merge |
| Indexes | Scalar / vector / full-text indexes | Built per relevant column; graph topology index for traversal |
| Search | Vector + full-text primitives | nearest / bm25 / rrf in one query, plus graph traversal |
| Querying | — | The .gq query language and .pg schema language |
How the pieces fit
- The schema (
.pg) and query (.gq) languages are compiled to a typed intermediate representation. - The engine runs queries and mutations against Lance, coordinates the manifest, maintains the commit graph, and builds indexes.
- The CLI (
omnigraph) and the HTTP server (operations/server.md) are two front ends over the same engine, so embedded and remote behavior match. - Cedar policy enforcement is engine-wide — every writer goes through the same authorization gate regardless of front end.
For deployment-scale topics — multi-graph servers, control-plane operations, recovery — see clusters.