AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to ShapedQL – A SQL engine for multi-stage ranking and RAG
Hi HN, I’m Tullie, founder of Shaped. Previously, I was a researcher at Meta AI, worked on ranking for Instagram Reels, and was a contributor to PyTorch Lightning. We built ShapedQL because we noticed that while retrieval (finding 1,000 items) has been commoditized by vector DBs, ranking (finding the best 10 items) is still an infrastructure problem. To build a decent for you feed or a RAG system with long-term memory, you usually have to put together a vector DB (Pinecone/Milvus), a feature store (Redis), an inference service, and thousands of lines of Python to handle business logic…
ShapedQL is a SQL engine designed to simplify building recommendation systems and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. It consolidates the typical stack of vector databases, feature stores, and inference… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
- 2
Shaped▲362The fastest path to relevant recommendations and search
2024 · shaped.ai · its alternatives →
- 3
I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey there HN! We’re Antonio, Luca, and Yuhang, and we’re excited to introduce Fast GraphRAG, an open-source RAG approach that leverages knowledge graphs and the 25 years old PageRank for better information retrieval and reasoning. Building a good RAG pipeline these days takes a lot of manual optimizations. Most engineers intuitively start from naive RAG: throw everything in a vector database and hope that semantic search is powerful enough. This can work for use cases where accuracy isn’t too important and hallucinations are tolerable, but it doesn’t work for more difficult queries that…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5PN
We've been hard at work for a few weeks and thought it's time for another update. In case you missed our first post, PostgresML is an end-to-end machine learning solution, running alongside your favorite database. This time we have more of a suite offering: project management, visibility into the datasets and the deployment pipeline decision making. Let us know what you think! Demo link is on the page, and also here: https://demo.postgresml.org
2022 · postgresml.org · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
I've built an advanced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline from scratch to demystify the complex mechanics of modern LLM-powered Question Answering systems. This repository features: -- An implementation of a sub-question query engine from scratch to answer complex user questions. -- Illustrative explanations that unveil the inner workings of the system. -- An analysis of the challenges I faced while working with the system, like prompt engineering and cost estimation. -- Qualitative comparison with similar frameworks like LlamaIndex, offering a broader perspective. Key Takeaway:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Hey HN, we want to share HelixDB (https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/), a project a college friend and I are working on. It’s a new database that natively intertwines graph and vector types, without sacrificing performance. It’s written in Rust and our initial focus is on supporting RAG. Here’s a video runthrough: https://screen.studio/share/szgQu3yq. Why a hybrid? Vector databases are useful for similarity queries, while graph databases are useful for relationship queries. Each stores data in a way that’s best for its main type of query (e.g.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Hi HN! We're building R2R [https://github.com/SciPhi-AI/R2R], an open source RAG answer engine that is built on top of Postgres+Neo4j. The best way to get started is with the docs - https://r2r-docs.sciphi.ai/introduction. This is a major update from our V1 which we have spent the last 3 months intensely building after getting a ton of great feedback from our first Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39510874). We changed our focus to building a RAG engine instead of a framework, because this is what developers asked for the most.…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hi HN - I'm Venkat, founder of Stayflexi (YC), CMU CS grad and Ex-Oracle Query Engine team (patents in core databases) DeepSQL started as an internal tool to stop our own databases from becoming the bottleneck they were becoming (13,000+ hotels in production). It worked well enough that we're releasing it. DeepSQL is an AI agent that operates a database the way a senior DBA and Data Engineer would 1. Fixes slow queries (we cutdown DB spend by 4x) 2. Fixes DB bloat (blocks unnecessary schema changes, in vibecoded setup) 2. BI dashboards(we removed spend on tableau, retool and appsmith) 3.…
Jul 2026 · deepsql.ai · its alternatives →
- 11
Vectorize▲246Build RAG pipelines that are optimized for your data.
2024 · vectorize.io · its alternatives →
- 12
A Go SQL query builder and struct mapper. Contribute to samonzeweb/godb development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
TL;DR: Vector-based RAG performs poorly for many real-world applications like codebase chats, and you should consider 'language maps'. Part of our mission at Mutable.ai is to make it much easier for developers to build and understand software. One of the natural ways to do this is to create a codebase chat, that answer questions about your repo and help you build features. It might seem simple to plug in your codebase into a state-of-the-art LLM, but LLMs have two limitations that make human-level assistance with code difficult: 1. They currently have context windows that are too small to…
2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Hi HN, We're Luke and Phillip, and we're building Spice.ai OSS - a lightweight, portable runtime, built in Rust and powered by Apache DataFusion to locally materialize, accelerate, and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse or data lake. Phillip and I first introduced Spice on Show HN in September 2021. Since then, we’ve been schooled and humbled in every way building 100TB+ data and ML systems for the https://spice.ai cloud platform. Along with our customers, we struggled with getting fast, low-latency, high-concurrency SQL query within a budget, accessing and…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15IB
upscaledb - a blazingly fast embedded key-value store with analytical functions
2016 · upscaledb.com · its alternatives →
- 16
QueryFlex▲67All-in-one database query generator designed for developers
2023 · queryflex.in · its alternatives →
- 17
A look at modern database approaches and how Citus scales PG
2016 · softwareengineeringdaily.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey! I'm Andrei. I got frustrated by how people tend to build overcomplicated backend systems, being "motivated" by big tech case studies and popular books. So, I started exploring lean architecture, and building my digital garden of ideas, approaches and data that align with this direction. Here I want to present one of the tools – Sizing tool for PostgreSQL. I've benchmarked PostgreSQL on different EC2 instances and disks, with different initial data sets to see performance that these instances can give you. And I've built a tool to visualize this data, which I welcome you to explore. So,…
Jul 2026 · postgres.saneengineer.com · its alternatives →
- 19HA
Hi all, we recently open sourced the first version of Hashquery, a Python library which lets you model analytics, DRY up common logic, and execute it against a database or warehouse. We were originally rendering SQL directly for all our queries, but that spiraled out of control with more complex analysis; the SQL needed to be changed sporadically for each new database dialect (BigQuery, Redshift, Aethena, Postgres, etc etc) and the SQL fragments were very challenging to reuse (and so fragments were copy-pasted all over). ~~~ Advantages we think it has over writing SQL by hand: - Queries are…
2024 · hashquery.dev · its alternatives →
- 20AW
2012 · ragic.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey HN — We're excited to share Trellis — a snowflake for unstructured data. We've built an AI engine that turns unstructured data into structured SQL-format based on the schema you define in natural language. We spent a lot of time building ML infrastructure and realized that most data warehouses and data pipelines are not designed for unstructured data (documents, PDFs, calls). While something like a Vector database and RAG are great at search tasks, they really struggle with aggregation and SQL type queries such as 1. How many emails in the past 6 months contain complaints about the…
2024 · demo.runtrellis.com · its alternatives →
- 22
- 23
Linq▲35Build search engine for texts, images and beyond In 1 hour
2023 · getlinq.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I built this web-based developer utility few years ago when I couldn't find any opensource GUI-based query builder for mysql (similar to what MS Access had). This app can be run locally. The online demo uses static hardcoded values. Screencast's link is included in the README file.
2023 · codeberg.org · its alternatives →
Also compare
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →