Slater – Low-memory graphdb designed for read-heavy graphs

Hi all - I just wanted to announce a low memory footprint FOSS graph db I've been working on (named Slater, after the Archer character). The most common complaint about Graph/GraphRAG DBs is the cost and memory footprint they consume: many depend on holding the whole dataset fully in RAM, which makes them expensive to run.

Slater starts with the premise of a fixed memory budget applied to an LRU cache of what's on disk, then uses ISAM blocks and DiskANN/Vamana/PQ to allow paging the contents of the graphs and vectors you need into that cache. It's designed around read-heavy-write-light cases, and can be backed either by local disk or by S3/GCS buckets with an optional sized local disk L2 cache as well.

Speaks standard Bolt, and is GDPR friendly (encryption at-rest and in-transit). Multi-user-multi-graph with ACLs, Rust-with-forbid-unsafe and NFS-friendly too (no mmaps). It's Apache licensed.

Please give it a try if you get a chance. Would love any suggestions or feedback.

Full disclosure: yes, it was authored by Claude Code, although I provided the storage model and design it used, along with code samples and influences from other open source projects like FalkorDB and Memgraph for Bolt wire-compatibility.

Thanks

▲

packetlost 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One recommendation: do not let the LLM write your README for you. It can write other docs (though IME they still suck at it), but your README needs to be focused and easily digestible by a human glancing at the project.

LLMs have no concept of focus when it comes to docs, so they spew out way more information than is necessary or helpful to a human reading the document.

▲

rickkjp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ha - ok understood, although in my specific case I think this is better than anything I would have written. I edited it pretty hard to get it to say what I wanted it to say, so not sure if that counts. Thanks anyway for the feedback.

	▲	hankbond an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is one of the cases where I think people really want a personal touch. Your README is the "hook" of a project, it's the first thing we see, and so you want to advertise "this thing was made with thought and care". Also the README does not need to be exhaustive, it should be a form of advertising and you can nest the lower level documentation in a /docs and link the sections from the README.

▲

UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've wanted to analyze all published scientific papers and authors and their citation relationships in Neo4j but hit resource limits so this is very interesting to me.

▲

pbronez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does "standard Bolt" relate to OpenCypher? Does Bolt support imply OpenCypher support?

	▲	rickkjp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bolt is the wire protocol, and Slater supports Cypher and ISO GQL as syntax over Bolt.