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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 -> ValueType

where

  • P is the name of the predicate. e.g. src.File
  • KeyType is the key type
  • ValueType is the value type

KeyType and ValueType are types; 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 Value, a term of type ValueType

(we use "term" here to avoid confusion with the use of "value" in a predicate).

Often the value is empty, represented by the empty record {}. Most predicates have all their information in the key.

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.