The triples package is a standard database package designed for use in other emacs modules. It works with either the builtin sqlite in Emacs 29 or the emacsql package, and provides a simple way of storing entities and their associated schema. The triples package is well suited to graph-like applications, where links between entities are important. The package has wrappers for most common operations, but it is anticipated that occasionally client modules would need to make their own sqlite calls. Many different database instances can be handled by the triples package. It is expected that clients supply the database connection. However, a standard triples database can be used, which is defined in triples-default-database-filename, and used when no filename is used to connect to by clients of the triples library.

This package is useful for simple applications that don’t want to write their own SQL calls, as well as more complicated applications that want to store many different kinds of objects without having to set up and manage a variety of tables, especially when there is a graph-like relationship between the entities. It also is suited for applications where different packages want to store different data about the same set of entities, or store the same data about very different sets of entities. For example, having everything that has a creation time be treated uniformly, regardless of the type of entity, is something that would be require more advanced solutions in normal SQL but is standard and easy in a Triple database. These benefits are due to the fact that the storage is extremely regular and flexible, with a schema defining multiple types that are independent of each other, and with all the schema being software-managed, but installed in the database itself. The disadvantage is that it can be significantly more inefficient. However, for the kind of applications that emacs typically uses, the inefficiencies typically are not significant.

This module is available through GNU ELPA, and can be installed as normal. However, most of the time this module is only useful in concert with another module which uses it as a library and will declare it as a dependency, so unless you are planning on developing with it, there is usually no need to install it directly.

This module is somewhat new and should be considered beta quality.

While it has basic functionality, there are significant parts, such as a querying language, that are missing. Whether anyone needs such parts will determine the priority in which they get built.

triples employs a design in which each entity can be a member of many types, and each type has multiple properties. The properties that a type has is defined by schema. Let’s take an example:

;; We assume a database called db has already been set up.
(triples-add-schema db 'person
       '(name :base/unique t :base/type string)
       '(age :base/unique t :base/type integer))
(triples-add-schema db 'employee
       '(id :base/unique t :base/type integer)
       '(manager :base/unique t)
       '(reportees :base/virtual-reversed employee/manager))

This adds a type called person, which can be set on any entity. There’s another type called employee, which can also be set, independently of other types. This schema is stored in the database itself, so the database can function properly regardless on what elisp has been loaded. The schema can be redefined multiple times without any issues.

The person has 2 properties, name, and age. They are both marked as unique, so they take a single value, not a list. If :base/unique was not true, the value would be a list. We also specify what type it is, which can be any elisp type. employee is similarly constructed, but has an interesting property, reportees, which is a base/virtual-reversed property, meaning that it is supplied with values, but rather can get them from the reversed relation of employee/manager.

We’ll explore how these types are used can be used in the section after next.

A triple is a unit of data consisting of a subject, a predicate, an object, and, optionally, internal metadata about the unit. The triple can be thought of as a link between the subject and object via the predicate.

Let’s say that, as in the example above, we want to store someone’s name. The triples would be a subject that uniquely identifies the person, a predicate that indicates the link between subject and object is about a name, and the object, which is the name value.

The object can become the subject, and this explains how the base/virtual-reversed predicate works. If Bob is the manager of Alice, then there could be a triple with Alice as the subject, manager as the predicate, and Bob as the object. But we can also find the reversed links, and ask who all are all the people that Bob manages. In this case, Bob is the subject, and Alice is the object. However, we don’t actually need to store this information and try to keep it in sync, we can just get it by querying for when the Bob is the object and manager is the predicate.

The ideas behind the database and notes on design can be found in the triples-design.org file.

Before a database can be used, it should be connected with. This is done by the triples-connect function, which can be called with a filename or without. If a filename isn’t given, a default one for the triples library, given in triples-default-database-filename is used. This provides a standard database for those that want to take advantage of the possibilities of having data from different sources that can build on each other.

An example of using this standard database is simply:

(let ((db (triples-connect)))
  (do-something-with db)
  (do-something-else-with db))

You could also use a global variable to hold the database connection, if you need the database to be active during many user actions.

A subject can be set all at once (everything about the subject), or dealt with per-type. For example, the following are equivalent:

(triples-delete-subject db "alice")
(triples-set-type db "alice" 'person :name "Alice Aardvark" :age 41)
(triples-set-type db "alice" 'employee :id 1901 :manager "bob")

(triples-set-subject db "alice" '(person :name "Alice Aardvark" :age 41)
                     '(employee :id 1901 :manager "bob"))

In the second, the setting of the entire subject implies deleting everything previously associated with it.

Here is how the data is retrieved:

(triples-get-subject db "alice")

Which returns, assuming we have “catherine” and “dennis” who have “alice” as their employee/manager:

'(:person/name "Alice Aardvark" :person/age 41 :employee/id 1901 :employee/manager "bob" :employee/reportees '("catherine" "dennis"))

Or,

(triples-get-type db "alice" 'employee)

Which returns

'(:manager "bob" :reportees '("catherine" "dennis"))

Note that these subject names are just for demonstration purposes, and wouldn’t make good subjects because they wouldn’t be unique in practice. See our document on triples design for more information.

There are other useful functions, including:

• triples-get-types, which gets all the types a subject has,
• triples-delete-subject, which deletes all data associated with a subject,
• triples-with-predicate, gets all triples that is about a specific property,
• triples-subject-with-predicate-object, get all subjects whose predicate is equal to object,
• triples-subjects-of-type, get all subjects which have a particular type.
• triples-remove-schema-type , remove a type and all associated data from the schema (should be rarely used).

Sometimes the triples library will require predicates that are without type, and sometimes with type, or “combined predicates”. The rule is that if the type is already specified in the function, it does not need to be respecified. If the type is not specified, it is included in the combined predicate.

When returning data, if data is from just one type, the type is not returned in the returned predicates. If the data is from multiple types, the type is returned as combined predicates.

Sometimes clients of this library need to do something with the database, and the higher-level triples functionality doesn’t help. If you would like lower-level functionality into handling triples, you can use the same low-level methods that the rest of this library uses. These start with triples-db-.

• triples-db-insert: Add a triple. Uses SQL’s REPLACE command, so there can’t be completely duplicate triples (including the property, which often can serve as a disambiguation mechanism).
• triples-db-delete: Delete triples matching the arguments. Empty arguments match everything, so (triples-db-delete db) will delete all triples.
• triples-db-delete-subject-predicate-prefix: Delete triples matching subjects and with predicates with a certain prefix. This can’t be done with triples-db-delete because that method uses exact matching for all arguments, and this uses prefix matching for the predicate.
• triples-db-select-pred-op: Select triples that contain, for a predicate, an object with some relationship to the passed in value. This function lets you look for values equal to, greater, less, than or, “like”, the passed in value.
• triples-db-select: Select triples matching any of the parts of the triple. Like triples-db-delete, empty arguments match everything. You can specify exactly what to return with a selector.

Sometimes this still doesn’t cover what you might want to do. In that case, you should write your own direct database access. However, please follow the coding patterns for the functions above in writing it, so that the code works with both Emacs 29’s builtin sqlite, and emacsql.

If your application wants to back up your database, the function triples-backup provides the capability to do so safely. It can be called like:

(triples-backup db db-file 3)

Where db is the database, db-file is the filename where that database is stored, and 3 is the number of most recent backup files to keep. All older backup files will be deleted. The backup is stored where other emacs file backups are kept, defined by backup-directory-alist.

The triples-backups module provides a way to backup a database in a way defined in the database itself (so multiple clients of the same database can work in a sane way together). The number of backups to be kept, along with the “strategy” of when we want backups to happen is defined once per database.

;; Set up a backup configuration if none exists.
(require 'triples-backups)
(unless (triples-backups-configuration db)
  (triples-backups-setup db 3 'daily))

Once this is set up, whenever a change happens, simply call triples-backups-maybe-backup with the database and the filename where the database was opened from, which will back up the database if appropriate. This should be done after any important database write, once the action, at the application level, is finished. The triples module doesn’t know when an appropriate point would be, so this is up to the client to run.

(defun my-package-add-data (data)
  (my-package-write-new-data package-db data)
  (triples-backups-maybe-backup db db-filename))

One possibility that arises from a design with entities (in triples terms, subjects) having multiple decomposable types like is done in the triples library is the possibility of many modules using the same database, each one adding their own data, but being able to make use out of each other’s data.

For example, in the examples above we have a simple system for storing data about people and employees. If another module adds a type for annotations, now you can potentially annotate any entity, including people and employees. If another module adds functionality to store and complete on email addresses, now people, employees, and potentially types added by other modules such as organizations could have email addresses.

If this seems to fit your use case, you may want to try to just use the default database. The downside of this is that nothing prevents other modules from changing, corrupting or deleting your data.