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Basic Concepts

This section explains the concepts behind how Glean stores data, and how to define a schema to describe your data.

A Glean Database consists of a set of Facts. Facts are unique; each fact is stored only once.

The Schema describing the database is a set of Predicates. You can think of the predicates as the types of the facts. Each fact is an instance of one predicate.

A predicate looks like this:

predicate P : KeyType

where

  • P is the name of the predicate. e.g. src.File
  • KeyType is the key type; the type of the facts.

The type language is described in Built-in Types.

Every fact in predicate P has:

  • A Fact ID: a unique 64-bit integer that identifies the fact
  • A Key, a term of type KeyType

A predicate can also have a value in addition to the key:

predicate P : KeyType -> ValueType

facts of P would then have a fact ID, a key term and a value term. When a predicate has a value in addition to the key, Glean enforces the property that each unique key has exactly one value. It is illegal to insert two facts with the same key and different values.

You can think of Glean as like a key/value store: we can look up a key K in predicate P and get back value V. We can also query for patterns that match multiple keys, and get back all the facts that match the pattern. More about this when we talk about Angle queries.