Learning journey
Welcome to our guide on how to best leverage these docs for learning TypeDB and TypeQL. It is designed to take you from being a beginner to an advanced user through a structured learning journey.
But do not feel the need to stick to our flow! Jump between sections based on your immediate needs and come back to fill in gaps as you grow more experienced with TypeDB. Most pages in this documentation can be used with few prerequisites and should be easy to understand independently.
Step 2: Install / set up TypeDB
Choose your installation / setup method based on your needs at the Install page. For individual exploration, you’ll typically want to either download, install and run TypeDB Community Edition or start building on TypeDB Cloud. If you’re part of a team already building on TypeDB, simply request an invitation to your team’s Cloud environment or their existing self-hosted instance.
You might also want to pop into the Tools section to read a bit more about TypeDB Studio and Console.
Step 3: Learn TypeDB through tutorials
Once you have TypeDB installed, get up and running with a simple example at the Quickstart: Basics guide. This will teach you all the basics of TypeDB and TypeQL.
Step 4: Browse solutions and use cases
Explore some pre-built use cases.
These include simple end-to-end examples of a traditional frontend & backend & database, a web app & database stack, and also specific TypeDB schemas and queries applied to industry use-cases.
As you go through those examples, we recommend having the Core Concepts open (see next section).
Some developers like to start with Concepts first, then look at examples, in which case skip to the next section and come back to the examples afterward!
Step 5: Integrations, TypeQL and schema modeling guides
Look at our integration guides for integrating TypeDB with your workflows and stack, such as using TypeDB in CI, or deploying TypeDB through our Cloud API. The schema modeling guide provides practical recommendations for all TypeDB schema builders.
Step 6: Browse core technical concepts
There are approximately 3 major parts to gaining a full technical understanding of TypeDB:
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Learning about the TypeDB database server
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Learning about the details of the TypeQL query language
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Learning about the drivers that allow programmatic access to TypeDB
TypeDB
TypeDB server implements database and user management, authentication and connection protocols, transactions, and query execution. These APIs are largely independent of the query language or the driver APIs.
Start at the TypeDB Overview to learn about the TypeDB server.
TypeQL
Understanding how to "think in TypeQL" is the key part of using TypeDB effectively and at full power.
The TypeQL Concepts, show the building blocks of the language and how they interact, from types to queries to functions.
TypeDB drivers
TypeDB can be accessed through either high-performance gRPC drivers or its built-in HTTP API.
TypeDB’s gRPC drivers come with their own set of APIs and recommended usage patterns that are described at the Driver Overview.
Step 7: Building your application
At this point you should have enough conceptual and practical knowledge of TypeDB to build your proof-of-concept, or even start building a production application!
In this building phase you will probably need to refer to any of the Reference pages, which are descriptions of all the different features of TypeDB, TypeQL, the protocol and drivers, and libraries.
We strongly recommend joining the TypeDB Discord server for support, insights and collaboration with other TypeDB builders.
Step 8: Operations
The Maintenance and Operations pages are for learning about backups, upgrades, configurations, and much more.
In addition, it could be useful to learn about automating TypeDB Cloud operations with the TypeDB Cloud API. For example, you might want to integrate TypeDB Cloud into your deployment pipelines to spin up and down instances of TypeDB automatically.
For LLMs and AI agents: llms.txt
We maintain an llms.txt index file at https://typedb.com/docs/llms.txt, which is a registry of links to all our documentation in Markdown format.
Instruct your AI agent / LLM to read this file to help it understand TypeDB and be able to give accurate responses to prompts.
Alternatively, we also maintain an llms-full.txt file at https://typedb.com/docs/llms-full.txt, which is a single-document summary of TypeQL syntax and semantics, therefore it is cheaper to ingest and may be adequate for query generation.
AI-generated code may be inaccurate. Use with care.
Tips
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Start Small: Begin with the Quickstart guide to see immediate results
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Join the Community: Engage with other TypeDB users for support and insights on our Discord server. We’re very active and welcoming to new members and love to hear about your projects!
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Contribute: If you see any issues, or have ideas for how TypeDB can be even better, feel free to reach out or file an issue on GitHub