TypeDB was conceived to solve the lack of expressivity in current database paradigms. Programming languages are becoming increasingly more declarative, empowering engineers to quickly write safe and expressive code backed by static type checking and abstract data constructs. Object-oriented programming involves complex modeling constructs such as abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism, requiring the expression of multidimensional data structures. However, current databases are unable to natively handle these data structures that we so easily take for granted.

Relational databases were designed at a time when procedural programming languages were the norm. They are built on Codd’s relational algebra and implemented using tables and one-dimensional tuples. As a result, relational databases are unable to natively model complex data structures due to their lack of expressivity. This fundamental incompatibility between object and relational models has become one of the biggest challenges in database engineering and left databases unable to evolve alongside programming languages.