Christoph recently took the time to sit down with Cal, our COO to be interviewed about his experiences at TypeDB, and working on a novel database.

TypeDB is the first entity-relation database. When we started the company, we set out to craft a generalist database that can natively express and translate between diverse data and models. We did so by creating our own language.

Despite breaking with the traditions of long-established database query languages, TypeQL often feels deeply familiar even to first-time users of the language—this is because TypeQL is directly built on the principles of modern programming language theory, which distill how we intuitively interact with computers using simple, yet formal, structures: types.

Unlike existing database paradigms, TypeDB is designed based on modern ideas from type theory. If you want to learn how this works in detail, you may be interested in our article on type-theoretic databases in our learning section. In this post, we will discuss a crucial difference between TypeDB and other database paradigms, which is a direct result of these type-theoretic foundations of TypeDB. But don’t worry, we won’t assume any familiarity with type theory and will keep our discussion as high level as possible!