Nobody should have to learn a query language to use a database

That sentence cost us a query language.

NEDB shipped with NQL — a FROM-first language built around the things NEDB can do that nothing else can: reach any point in history, ask what was believed true as of a date, walk the causal chain that produced a record. It works. It is also a tax: before you can ask NEDB a question, you have to learn how to ask.

Meanwhile the engine grew a PostgreSQL wire-protocol endpoint, and the SQL arriving on it was translated into NQL by string surgery. That is where every interesting bug lived. A qualified column (WHERE orders.status = 'paid') was rewritten by hand and silently matched nothing. HAVING n > 1 passed through verbatim and answered zero rows. total * 2 became a field name nothing was called, so the column came back blank. Not one of those was an engine bug. Every one was a translation bug.

And translation had a ceiling it could never clear. NQL's grouped row carries the group key, count, and exactly one named aggregate — so SELECT sum(total), avg(total) GROUP BY status was not slow or degraded, it was unrepresentable. No amount of cleverness in the translator fixes a row model.

So we stopped translating.

What neSQL is

PostgreSQL's real grammar — gram.y, all 19,513 lines and 492 keywords of it, vendored from PostgreSQL 17.4 with its copyright notice intact — extended with the handful of clauses NEDB needs to say what it can actually do.

vendor/postgresql/
  gram.y                   19,513 lines   the real parser, unmodified upstream
  kwlist.h                    492 keywords
  system_views.sql          1,377 lines   pg_catalog, Postgres's own definitions
  information_schema.sql    3,046 lines   the standard catalogue, verbatim
  COPYRIGHT                    23 lines   permissive; modification expressly granted

We are not reimplementing SQL from memory. We are starting from the definition every other tool in the world was built against, and adding to it — the same road CockroachDB, Materialize and RisingWave all took.

The clauses we add, and why

PostgreSQL's grammar contains no temporal SQL — we checked, and SYSTEM_TIME, PERIOD and PORTION appear exactly zero times in gram.y. Time travel was never going to arrive for free. So it arrives deliberately:

And what the vendored grammar hands us for free, which the old translator refused by name: WITH RECURSIVE, window functions, GROUPING SETS, and MERGE — upsert, which lands remarkably naturally on an append-only store.

What this means if you already speak Postgres

You are done learning.

-- ordinary SQL. nothing to look up.
SELECT status, sum(total), avg(total)
  FROM orders
 WHERE region = 'eu'
 GROUP BY status
HAVING count(*) > 1;

-- the same query, ninety thousand writes ago
SELECT status, sum(total), avg(total)
  FROM orders AS OF SYSTEM TIME 412
 GROUP BY status;

-- why does this row say what it says?
TRACE 'order-8814';

The first query is the point. It is not a NEDB query. It is a query — and the audit trail underneath it is free, permanent, and hash-verified, with no triggers, no shadow tables, and no application code.

Status: pre-release, and honest about it

This repository is the grammar and the front-end, being built in the open. It is not installable yet, and the package on each registry is a reserved name, not a product. When that changes it will change here first.

Today, right now, in production: the PostgreSQL endpoint in nedb-engine already answers psql, SQLAlchemy (Core and ORM), asyncpg and node-postgres against a live store, with pg_catalog and information_schema implemented as genuinely queryable relations. neSQL is where that stops needing an asterisk.

Licence

neSQL is BUSL-1.1 — free in production under USD $1M annual revenue, converting to Apache 2.0 automatically. See LICENSE.

The vendored PostgreSQL sources under vendor/postgresql/ remain under the PostgreSQL Licence, reproduced verbatim and unmodified at vendor/postgresql/COPYRIGHT. Our thanks to the PostgreSQL Global Development Group — thirty years of grammar we did not have to guess at.