Corax is the new indexing and querying engine in RavenDB, which recently came out with RavenDB 6.0. Our focus when building Corax was on one thing, performance. I did a full talk explaining how it works from the inside out, available here as well as a couple of podcasts.

Now that RavenDB 6.0 has been out for a while, we’ve had the chance to complete a few features that didn’t make the cut for the big 6.0 release. There is a host of small features for Corax, mostly completing tasks that were not included in the initial 6.0 release.

All these features are available in the 6.0.102 release, which went live in late April 2024.

The most important new feature for Corax is query plan visualization.

Let’s run the following query in the RavenDB Studio on the sample data set:

from index 'Orders/ByShipment/Location'
where spatial.within(ShipmentLocation, 
                  spatial.circle( 10, 49.255, 4.154, 'miles')
      )
and (Employee = 'employees/5-A' or Company = 'companies/85-A')
order by Company, score()
include timings()

Note that we are using the includetimings() feature. If you configure this index to use Corax, issuing the above query will also give us the full query plan. In this case, you can see it here:

You can see exactly how the query engine has processed your query and the pipeline it has gone through.

We have incorporated many additional features into Corax, including phrase queries, scoring based on spatial results, and more complex sorting pipelines. For the most part, those are small but they fulfill specific needs and enable a wider range of scenarios for Corax.

Over six months since Corax went live with 6.0, I can tell that it has been a successful feature. It performs its primary job well, being a faster and more efficient querying engine. And the best part is that it isn’t even something that you need to be aware of.

Corax has been the default indexing engine for the Development and Community editions of RavenDB for over 3 months now, and almost no one has noticed.

It’s a strange metric, I know, for a feature to be successful when no one is even aware of its existence, but that is a common theme for RavenDB. The whole point behind RavenDB is to provide a database that works, allowing you to forget about it.