Dali.EntityFrameworkCore 0.0.7.1-alpha

Dali — SurrealDB Document Store

A .NET document store for SurrealDB with a Marten-compatible fluent API — idiomatic .NET sessions, schema management, indexing, and LINQ querying over SurrealDB's multi-model engine.

Goal

Be the MartenDB for SurrealDB. Bring the ergonomic document-session pattern, fluent schema configuration, and LINQ query pipeline that the .NET ecosystem loves to SurrealDB's document, graph, and search capabilities. If you've used Marten with PostgreSQL, Dali should feel like home.

Quick Start

// Configure
var store = Documents.For(opts =>
{
    opts.Namespace = "myapp";
    opts.Database   = "production";

    // Schema & indexes
    opts.Schema.For<User>()
        .Identity(u => u.Id)
        .Index(u => u.Email, c => c.IsUnique())
        .Index(u => new { u.FirstName, u.LastName })
        .FullTextIndex(u => u.Bio, "english");
});

await store.InitializeAsync();

// Write
await using var session = store.LightweightSession();
session.Store(new User { Name = "Alice", Email = "alice@example.com" });
await session.SaveChangesAsync();

// Read
await using var query = store.QuerySession();
var alice = await query.Query<User>()
    .FirstOrDefaultAsync(u => u.Email == "alice@example.com");

API Surface

Document Sessions

Schema & Indexing

opts.Schema.For<T>()
    .Identity(x => x.Id)                                    // designate primary key
    .Index(x => x.Prop)                                      // single-column btree
    .Index(x => x.Prop, c => { c.IsUnique(); c.WithName("…"); })  // with options
    .Index(x => new { x.FirstName, x.LastName })              // multi-column composite via anonymous type
    .UniqueIndex(x => x.Prop)                                 // shortcut unique
    .FullTextIndex(x => x.Body, "english")                    // full-text search
    .HnswIndex(x => x.Embedding, 1536)                        // vector (HNSW)
    .MtreeIndex(x => x.Embedding, 768)                        // vector (MTREE)
    .DiskannIndex(x => x.Embedding, 1536, vectorType: "F16")  // vector (DiskANN)
    .SpatialIndex(x => x.Location)                             // geo-spatial marker
    .MultiTenanted()                                           // tenant-id filtered
    .SetSchemaMode(SchemaMode.Strict)                          // SCHEMAFULL / Flexible
    .Schema("analytics_db");                                   // route to a SurrealDB database

Schema vs Database: Dali's .Schema("name") is named for Marten API parity, where it maps to a PostgreSQL schema. In SurrealDB, the hierarchy is Namespace → Database → Table (no RDBMS schemas). Under the hood, .Schema("name") switches to a different SurrealDB database within the same namespace via USE NS x DB name. This lets you logically partition tables (e.g., separate sales and analytics databases in a single store).

LINQ Querying

var results = await session.Query<User>()
    .Where(u => u.Age >= 18 && u.Name.Contains("A"))
    .OrderBy(u => u.Name)
    .Skip(20).Take(10)
    .ToListAsync();

Marten Parity

Credits

Dali was solely and greatly inspired by Jeremy D. Miller and the genius developers over at JasperFx and their brilliant library MartenDB for PostgreSQL, which we have used for years. They just released Polecat for MSSQL, which is awesome. We recently had a need to use SurrealDB in a project and decided to follow the MartenDB patterns. Dali depends on SurrealDB.net, another awesome OSS library from the SurrealDB team.

• MartenDB
• Polecat
• SurrealDB.net