Despite breaking with the traditions of long-established database query languages, TypeQL often feels deeply familiar even to first-time users of the language—this is because TypeQL is directly built on the principles of modern programming language theory, which distill how we intuitively interact with computers using simple, yet formal, structures: types.

Unlike existing database paradigms, TypeDB is designed based on modern ideas from type theory. If you want to learn how this works in detail, you may be interested in our article on type-theoretic databases in our learning section. In this post, we will discuss a crucial difference between TypeDB and other database paradigms, which is a direct result of these type-theoretic foundations of TypeDB. But don’t worry, we won’t assume any familiarity with type theory and will keep our discussion as high level as possible!

Polymorphism can be one of the most challenging things to model in a database. Not only do you want your database to be performant, you also want it to feel intuitive so that queries you write make sense and are simple to maintain, and polymorphic data can easily mess up that balance if you don’t take the time to consider how best to implement it.