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BrightstarDB

A .NET-native RDF store with SPARQL support and binding of RDF resources to .NET dynamic objects. Supports multi-threaded reads with ACID transactions but no horizontal scaling.

Visit website GitHub 464 stars
Overall rank
#76
First released
February 2012
License
MIT
Built with
C#

Details

Type
RDF
Kind
Embedded
Category
Emerging
Status
Inactive — No active development since 2015.
License
MIT
Language
C#
Query Languages
SPARQLLINQ
Protocols
HTTP/RESTSPARQL Protocol

Feature scores

Community & Business

Active development
✓
Updated within last 3 months
Commercial support
0%
No commercial support
Live community
✓
>75% of issues addressed
Open Source
✓
Open source license
Pricing
0%
No pricing information
Trendiness
0%
Declining trend

Deployment

Containerization
0%
No container image
Work as dedicated instance
✓
Can run as standalone server
Work as embedded
✓
Can embed in application
Testing in-memory version
0%
No in-memory option

Platform

Operating on Linux
75%
Open source (Linux compatible)
Operating on Windows
75%
Open source (Windows compatible)
SaaS offering
0%
Self-hosted only

Operations

Automatic updates
0%
Manual updates only
Client side caching
0%
No client-side caching
Data versioning support
0%
No versioning
Live backups
0%
No live backups

Distribution

Cluster Re-balancing
0%
No auto-rebalancing
Data Distribution
✓
Data sharding supported
High-Availability
✓
HA mechanisms available
Query Distribution
✓
Distributed query execution
Replication support
✓
Replication available

Developer Experience

Data types defined
50%
Basic data types only
Logging/Auditing
✓
Event logging supported
Object-Graph Mapper
0%
No object mapper
Reactive programming
0%
No reactive programming
Documentation up-to-date
✓
Docs current with latest version
Binary protocol
✓
Binary protocol available
CLI
✓
Command-line interface
GUI
✓
Visual interface available

Data Model

Multi-database
0%
Graph-only
Graph-native data
✓
Native graph storage
REST API
✓
REST endpoint available
Query Language
✓
Standard query language (Cypher/Gremlin)

Transactions

Granular locking
0%
No granular locking
Multiple isolation levels
✓
Multiple isolation levels
Read committed transaction
✓
Read committed available
Transaction support
✓
ACID transactions

Schema & Security

Constraints
0%
No constraints
Schema support
0%
Schema-less
Secondary indexes
✓
Secondary indexes supported
Server side procedures
✓
Stored procedures supported
Triggers
0%
No triggers
Authentication
0%
No authentication
Authorization
0%
No authorization
Data encryption
0%
No encryption
Sources 6 references

Protocols HTTP/REST, SPARQL Protocol

REST(JSON) and SPARQL 1.1 Protocol (query/update/graph-store) are both served from the same BrightstarDB HTTP service (:8090/brightstar). Older v1.3 docs additionally listed WCF net.tcp and named-pipe connection types; current docs no longer list them.

License MIT

SPDX identifier as classified by GitHub from the repository licence file.

Released 2012-02

Confirms current value: the public beta was announced on the W3C semantic-web mailing list on 7 Feb 2012, well before the GitHub repo (created 2013, after the project went open source) existed.

Language C#

Confirms current value.

  • The code-base is now being developed and compiled under VS2015 using C# 6.0 constructs. To compile BrightstarDB you will require a minimum of Visual Studio 2015 Express or Mono 4.0.
    What's New — BrightstarDB 1.13 documentation · reviewed 2026-08-02