Frequently asked questions

OriginChain is a managed AI-native database. You write a question in English, the instance compiles it into a query plan once, caches it, and serves every repeat in milliseconds. SQL, vector search, full-text, and graph traversal all run against the same store, behind a single bearer and a single endpoint.

A single-tenant OriginChain instance in the region you pick: an HTTPS endpoint, a bearer token, a private write-ahead log, and encrypted nightly backups. We provision, operate, TLS-terminate, rate-limit, back up, and upgrade. You post requests, you get JSON.

Whisper starts at $99/mo for prototypes and side projects, Thunder is $599/mo for production workloads, and Storm is $1499/mo for high-throughput deployments with a 99.95% SLA. Storage is billed separately, $9 to $699/mo depending on capacity. Add-ons (SQL Pro, Vector Search, Full-Text Pro, Graph, Transactions, sub-second PITR) attach to any tier. Annual billing saves 15%. Enterprise is custom — contact sales.

Yes — 7 days on a Whisper-tier instance ($99/mo equivalent), 20 GB of storage included, in the region you choose. The trial is offered once per account on Whisper. A card is captured at instance create so the subscription converts seamlessly; no charges during the trial, cancel any time. You get a real endpoint with real backups, not a sandbox.

Asia Pacific (Mumbai) is live today. US East, US West, EU Ireland, EU Frankfurt, AP Singapore, AP Tokyo, and South America (São Paulo) are coming soon — each one lights up as AI compute is brought online there. Your data, write-ahead log, backups, and the AI compile call all stay inside the region you pick.

Pick a region, pick a compute and storage tier, enter a card. In about two minutes you receive an HTTPS endpoint and a bearer token. From there: install the Python SDK or call the HTTP API directly, declare a collection with `oc schema register`, and post your first row. Quickstart docs are at /docs.

Five surfaces against one store: SQL (SELECT/INSERT/DELETE, GROUP BY, HAVING, INNER + LEFT/RIGHT/FULL OUTER + chained JOINs), vector search (HNSW with cosine, dot, and L2; filtered topk), full-text (BM25, phrase queries, UAX #29 Unicode tokenizer, 18-language stemming), graph traversal (neighbors, BFS, path reachability, weighted shortest path), and natural-language /ask. Every shape compiles down to reads against the same hash-keyed k/v store.

Yes. A row's embedding lives at a vector key prefix in the same store as the row itself. Atomic batched writes mean your row, its embedding, and its full-text postings always commit together — no separate vector DB to ETL into, no eventual-consistency window between systems.

Send an English sentence to /ask and the instance compiles it into a query plan once, caches the plan, and reuses it for every future request that matches that shape. The compile step calls your configured LLM (Claude on AWS Bedrock by default) only on first touch. After that, the LLM is not consulted again — repeat asks return from the plan cache in milliseconds.

Only the English sentence and a small schema-shape catalog snippet (column names and types). It never sees rows, never sees the WAL, never sees secrets. The compile call stays inside the same region as your instance — the AI provider is treated as an in-region peer, not an internet hop.

Yes. The graph endpoint exposes one-hop forward and reverse neighbors (including correct reverse traversal on self-relations), BFS up to a configurable max depth, path reachability, and weighted shortest path (Dijkstra) with a caller-supplied weight function. All on the same store as your rows — no separate graph DB.

The default tokenizer is UAX #29 Unicode-segmented — it handles Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), Arabic, Devanagari, and Hebrew out of the box. The optional analyzer pipeline adds Snowball stemming for 18 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, Arabic, Tamil, Indonesian) plus diacritics fold and stop-words. BM25 ranking uses Lucene defaults (k1=1.2, b=0.75).

Single-row writes are atomic and single-row CAS gives you optimistic concurrency control via _oc_row_version. That covers most OLTP patterns. For multi-row snapshot-isolation transactions, attach the Transactions add-on — it gives you begin / get / put / delete / commit / abort across multiple rows under snapshot isolation.

Cached query path is sub-millisecond inside the engine plus a few milliseconds over the network — Thunder and Storm hit p99 under 8 ms in-region. First-time /ask queries round-trip to the AI compiler and typically return in 200–500 ms; that cost is paid once per question shape and every subsequent variant of the same shape is on the fast path.

Cached intents return in under 50 ms. First-time queries compile via your configured LLM (Claude on Bedrock by default) and typically return in 200–500 ms depending on schema size and sentence complexity. Schema prompt-caching gives you a ~90% discount on repeated catalog tokens.

HNSW topk ships two modes. Default `high_recall` hits recall@10 = 0.96 at 100k vectors with p99 109 ms. `fast` mode runs p99 37 ms at recall 0.69 — pick it for RAG with re-rankers or hot dashboards where latency dominates. Cosine, dot, and L2 metrics are supported, with f32 SIMD distance kernels and a deserialized graph cache. Filtered topk uses metadata equality predicates evaluated during graph traversal. Brute-force fallback for very small indexes. Numbers above are from a deterministic 100k-vector benchmark (D=128, M=16, ef_construction=200, 1000 queries).

Whisper targets ~50 req/s and 5M rows. Thunder targets ~2,000 req/s and 250M rows. Storm targets ~6,000 req/s and 1000M rows with a 99.95% SLA. You resize compute and storage independently — both hot, no downtime.

HNSW is verified at 100k vectors per index with the recall and latency numbers above (recall@10 = 0.96, p99 109 ms in default high_recall mode). Many tenants run several indexes per instance for hundreds of thousands of total vectors. For larger single-index workloads, contact sales@originchain.ai about Enterprise — we'll match the index strategy to your dataset.

Every managed instance ships with encrypted nightly backups at no extra cost. Backups stay inside the region of your instance and are integrity-checked daily. Restore is available on demand from the console or the HTTP API.

Yes. Sealed-segment PITR is included on every paid tier — restore to any 15-minute checkpoint from the dashboard or the HTTP API. Sub-second LSN-precise PITR is available as an add-on for compliance-heavy workloads that need to rewind to a specific event.

Active-passive with synchronous replication. RPO = 0 on paid tiers — every commit is acknowledged by the standby before the client sees success. RTO is around 25 seconds in our drills. Snapshot-bootstrap means a new follower can join without operator intervention, and failover preserves full state.

Per-instance metrics (request rate, latency percentiles, error rate, plan-cache hit rate, replication lag) in the console, plus OTLP push to your own collector if you bring an endpoint. Audit logging is on by default and queryable through the console or the API. EXPLAIN is available on every query path.

Python is available today — fully typed, both sync and async, with helpers for /rows, /query, /ask, /watch, /sql, /vector, /fts, and /graph. Coming soon: TypeScript. The HTTP surface is documented and stable, so any language with an HTTP client works today.

Yes. The /v1/watch endpoint streams updates for any expression over Server-Sent Events — same protocol across every region and tier. Useful for reactive dashboards, alerting, and agent loops that need to react to changes.

Yes. Every instance runs on a dedicated, region-isolated host. No shared compute, no shared storage, no noisy neighbors. Your data, your write-ahead log, your backups, and the AI compile call all stay inside the region you pick.

TLS 1.3 in transit on every endpoint. AES-256 encryption at rest for the data volume and for backups. Bearer tokens authenticate every request and rotate via the console with a 60-second grace window for rolling deploys. Customer-managed keys (BYOK) are available on Enterprise.

Yes. Every authenticated request is recorded with timestamp, principal, endpoint, and outcome. Audit logs are queryable through the console and the API, exportable to your own SIEM via OTLP, and retained according to your tier's retention policy.

SOC 2 Type 1 audit is underway with our auditor — contact security@originchain.ai for the current letter and timeline. HIPAA BAA and GDPR DPA are available on Enterprise. Every instance ships with TLS 1.3, bearer auth, encrypted backups, single-tenant isolation, and audit logging regardless of tier.

Inside the region you pick — and only that region. Compute, storage, write-ahead log, backups, audit logs, and the AI compile call all stay in-region. You can pin Enterprise instances to a specific availability zone for residency contracts that require it.

Add-ons are flat-monthly capabilities you attach to any instance — SQL Pro ($49), Vector Search ($79), Full-Text Pro ($49), Graph ($59), Transactions ($99), Intra-Segment PITR ($149), Multi-Writer Cluster (Enterprise). Toggle them on or off any time from the billing page; charges are prorated by the day.

Upgrades and add-on attachments are prorated by the day on your next invoice. Downgrades and detachments take effect immediately and credit the unused portion of the cycle. Resizing compute or storage is a hot operation — no downtime, no reconnection needed.

Yes. Annual billing saves 15% on compute, storage, and add-ons. Talk to sales@originchain.ai for multi-year terms or volume commitments.

Overage is charged on your next cycle at $0.02 per natural-language query, $0.0001 per DB call, and $0.12 per GB of egress above the tier baseline. You see a real-time meter in the console, and you can set hard caps that throttle requests with a 429 once a threshold is hit.

Custom SLA, customer-managed keys (BYOK), HIPAA BAA, GDPR DPA, multi-region deployments, named support engineer, negotiated quotas, custom retention, multi-writer cluster access, and an annual contract. Contact sales@originchain.ai.