KuzuDB says so long and thanks for all the commits, marooning community

3 weeks ago 1

The KuzuDB embedded graph database, open source under the MIT license, has been abandoned by its creator and sponsor Kùzu Inc, leaving its community pondering whether to fork or find an alternative.

A few days ago, the GitHub project was archived and a note appeared stating that "Kuzu is working on something new." In addition, the documentation and blog post archive were moved from the Kuzu website to GitHub.

KuzuDB is designed for analytics on large databases and includes full text search, vector indexes, query parallelism for fast performance on multi-core hosts, and WebAssembly bindings for in-browser use. As an embedded database manager, it is easily integrated into applications. The first release was in November 2022, and it was based on research from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. The company is based in Toronto, Ontario.

There were few clues about the impending change. Software engineer Prashanth Rao, who worked for the company, posted three weeks ago on LinkedIn that "Kuzu is a great balance of everything! With a great community too!" Three days ago, a new post stated: "I'm no longer working at Kùzu."

"Holy shit Kuzu is dead," said a user on the Graphgeeks Discord forum, followed by: "I feel silly for championing Kuzu at work now."

A user on Reddit said that "as a person who looked at the 5000+ commits, active development, and 3 year history of the repo as a sign of a maturing technology, I invested a lot of time in using Kuzu this year … now the big question is whether it was all for nothing."

As an open source project, Kuzu can be forked, and one company, Kineviz, has already done so, under the name bighorn. On Discord, Kineviz founder Weidong Yang said: "We are looking for like-minded individuals and companies to maintain and develop KuzuDB together."

A user remarked that "there's probably six people that actually understand the codebase," noting the challenges of taking on development. Another issue is that the KuzuDB file format has been in flux and was changed to a single-file format in the last release, 0.11.0, in July.

A preview GitLab project, called Knowledge Graph, is based on KuzuDB.

Why the sudden abandonment of a well-liked product that was growing in popularity? Some users speculated that "we're working on something new" suggests an impending acquisition or shift in focus to a more easily monetizable product or service.

Users now have to decide whether to put their faith in a fork or to shift to another product. ®

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