About CrateDB

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A high-level description about CrateDB, with cross-references to relevant resources in the spirit of a curated knowledge backbone.

CrateDB is a distributed and scalable SQL database for storing and analyzing massive amounts of data in near real-time, even with complex queries. It is based on Lucene, inherits technologies from Elasticsearch, and is compatible with PostgreSQL.

What's inside

• A few tidbits of structured docs.

• The cratedb-outline.yaml file indexes documents about what CrateDB is and what you can do with it.

• The about/v1 folder includes llms.txt files generated from cratedb-outline.yaml by expanding all links. They can be used to provide better context for conversations about CrateDB.

Install

From PyPI

uv tool install --upgrade 'cratedb-about[all]'

From Repository

uv tool install --upgrade 'cratedb-about[all] @ git+https://github.com/crate/about'

Usage

Outline

CLI

Convert knowledge outline from builtin cratedb-outline.yaml into Markdown format.

cratedb-about outline --format=markdown > outline.md

Use a custom outline file on a local or remote filesystem.

cratedb-about outline --url https://github.com/crate/about/raw/refs/heads/main/src/cratedb_about/outline/cratedb-outline.yaml

When using this option, you will need to minimally install the package including its manyio extra like cratedb-about[manyio]. After opting in, you can address resources on many filesystems through the excellent filesystem-spec package. Alternatively to the --url option, you can also use the ABOUT_OUTLINE_URL environment variable.

API

Use the Python API to retrieve individual sets of outline items, for example, by section name. The standard section names are: Docs, API, Examples, Optional. The API can be used to feed information to a Model Context Protocol (MCP) documentation server, for example, a subsystem of cratedb-mcp.

from cratedb_about import CrateDbKnowledgeOutline

# Load information from builtin YAML file.
outline = CrateDbKnowledgeOutline.load()

# Load information from remote YAML file.
# outline = CrateDbKnowledgeOutline.load("http://example.org/outline.yaml")

# List available section names.
outline.get_section_names()

# Retrieve information about resources from the "Docs" and "Examples" sections.
outline.find_items(section_name="Docs", as_dict=True)
outline.find_items(section_name="Examples", as_dict=True)

# Convert outline into Markdown format.
outline.to_markdown()

llms-txt

Build

The Markdown file outline.md serves as the source for generating the llms.txt file.

llms_txt2ctx --optional=true outline.md > llms-full.txt

Generate multiple llms.txt files along with any auxiliary output files.

export OUTDIR=./public_html
cratedb-about build

Query

Ask questions about CrateDB from the command line.

CLI

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY>
cratedb-about ask "CrateDB does not seem to provide an AUTOINCREMENT feature?"

API

Use the Python API to ask questions about CrateDB.

from cratedb_about import CrateDbKnowledgeConversation

knowledge = CrateDbKnowledgeConversation()
knowledge.ask("CrateDB does not seem to provide an AUTOINCREMENT feature?")

If you are running out of questions, get inspired by the standard library.

cratedb-about list-questions

To configure a different context file, use the CRATEDB_CONTEXT_URL environment variable. The default value is https://cdn.crate.io/about/v1/llms-full.txt.

Project Information

Acknowledgements

Kudos to the authors of all the many software components and technologies this project is building upon.

Contributing

The cratedb-about package is an open source project, and is managed on GitHub. Contributions of any kind are very much appreciated.