Introduction
What is SurrealDB?
SurrealDB is a multi-model, distributed database engine that combines relational, document, graph, time-series, vector, and geospatial capabilities - all within a single ACID-compliant engine. It features SurrealQL, a SQL-style language designed for real-time, hybrid queries across these models.
Read our Getting started with SurrealDB article, or view our SurrealDB docs
What use cases is SurrealDB good for?
SurrealDB is ideal for:
SaaS platforms
AI and personalisation apps
IoT and event-driven systems
Real-time collaborative applications
Stack consolidation to replace multiple databases
Can SurrealDB be used for AI applications?
Yes. SurrealDB offers built-in vector search, graph reasoning, time-travel-style querying, and SurrealML for in-database model inference - making it ideal for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI-native apps.
Is SurrealDB good for recommendation engines?
Yes. Saks Fifth Avenue uses SurrealDB to deliver 1.5 million AI-driven product recommendations weekly, with a simplified architecture combining document and vector data.
Can SurrealDB handle event-processing and observability workloads?
Yes. Tencent uses SurrealDB to process millions of events per second and run deep observability queries using graph and vector capabilities.
What is SurrealDB Labs?
SurrealDB Labs features official and community-built tools, SDKs, and integrations all in one place. Build and ship faster by exploring SurrealDB Labs.
Getting started
How do I get started with SurrealDB?
You can begin by running SurrealDB locally (Docker, CLI) or via Surreal Cloud, and using the Surrealist UI to explore your schema and data.
How should I onboard my team to SurrealDB?
Whether deploying on Surreal Cloud or managing your own SurrealDB clusters, teams can quickly get started with streamlined tools like Surrealist, CLI utilities, and straightforward installation methods. Read our Deployment, tools and team onboarding guide.
Core capabilities
What data models does SurrealDB support?
SurrealDB supports:
Document storage
Graph relations
Time-series data
Vector search
Geospatial coordinates
Hybrid relational models
All in a single backend.
Architecture docs page and our Core features and design patterns guide
What is SurrealQL?
SurrealQL is the SQL-inspired query language built into SurrealDB. It supports graph traversals, conditionals, full-text search, aggregations, and vector search in one syntax.
SurrealQL language guide
Is SurrealDB suitable for vector search?
Yes. SurrealDB supports HNSW and MTree indexes for fast similarity search. This is available in self-hosted deployments and planned for Surreal Cloud.
Where can I find the latest features?
Once features are released, we document them in our release notes and on our features page, which is a great place to understand capabilities.
You can also check some of our new features for v2.3.3:
How do I scale SurrealDB?
SurrealDB can be scaled vertically on a single node by adding more compute power and memory to a server instance.
SurrealDB can also be scaled horizontally by sitting in front of and connecting to a TiKV to store data. TiKV is a highly scalable, low latency, and easy to use key-value datastore. TiKV supports raw and transaction-based querying with ACID compliance, and support for multiple concurrent readers and writers. The design of TiKV is inspired by distributed systems from Google, such as BigTable, Spanner, and Percolator, and some of the latest achievements in academia in recent years, such as the Raft consensus algorithm.
When running in FoundationDB distributed cluster mode, SurrealDB offloads the storage to the key-value store, operating as an advanced query engine layer. It is then possible to increase the number of SurrealDB nodes as required, in order to handle the query and transaction processing requirements.
Deployment and migration
How do I deploy SurrealDB?
Deployment options include:
Managed: Surreal Cloud
Self-hosted: Docker or CLI
Can I migrate relational data into SurrealDB?
Yes. Tables and foreign keys map naturally to SurrealDB’s document and graph structure.
Data modelling blog
How do I import data into SurrealDB?
Use SurrealQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, or Surrealist. Supports documents, graph, and time-series ingestion.
See our Data import and migration guide
Security and compliance
Does SurrealDB support fine-grained access control?
Yes. SurrealDB supports role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) with row- and field-level rules.
Access control docs
Where can I find SurrealDB’s security certifications and policies?
SurrealDB is certified for GDPR, ISO 27001 and SOC2 Type 1. We are also working towards Cyber Essentials Plus, SOC 2 Type 2, and HIPAA
SurrealDB Trust Centre
How secure is Surreal Cloud?
Your data security is our most important priority. Surreal Cloud is built on AWS using modern best practices for security. More detail is provided within our security addendum. SurrealDB provides powerful native security capabilities, including flexible authentication and fine-grained security and access control capabilities, down to the record, row, and field level, with support for built-in or 3rd party authentication providers, and granular access permissions.
Is Surreal Cloud compliant?
We are currently GDPR, CCPA, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 (Type 1) compliant. We will shortly be SOC 2 (Type 2) compliant. After that, we will be working towards Cyber Essentials Plus, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and FedRAMP compliance. If you have other compliance requirements, please contact us. You can read more about our compliance status in our Trust Center.
How resilient is SurrealDB and Surreal Cloud?
SurrealDB is being used by large enterprises in production at scale, you can read our case studies here. All Surreal Cloud development and production instances are backed up daily. You will soon be able to configure backup frequency and retention. Dedicated fault tolerant clusters are available upon request. We will soon allow users to self-serve fault tolerant deployments as part of the Scale plan.
What cloud provider is Surreal Cloud built on?
Surreal Cloud currently runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We plan to expand to Google Cloud (GCP) and Microsoft Azure in the near future.
What is the license for SurrealDB?
Source code for SurrealDB is variously licensed under a number of different licenses. A copy of each license can be found in each repository on GitHub. For more information on the licenses view the license details page.
What does the license restrict you from doing?
You can use and scale SurrealDB to any number of nodes, and can run it as a server or embed it in to your applications (whether you ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). You can even run it as a service internally, to your employees, contractors, and subsidiary companies. The only thing that you are not able to do is offer a commercial, hosted version of SurrealDB as a service (a database-as-a-service) without buying a license.
Pricing and support
Is there a free tier for Surreal Cloud?
Yes. The Individual tier is free for development and testing
Surreal Cloud plans
How is usage calculated in Surreal Cloud?
Usage is based on:
Data storage
Query volume
Compute usage
What support options are available?
SurrealDB provides:
Free community support via Discord and GitHub
Account and Billing support for all Surreal Cloud users
Paid enterprise support with SLAs and technical account management
What payment methods are available for Surreal Cloud?
Surreal Cloud supports credit card by default. If you need other payment methods, please contact us.
How does pricing work for Surreal Cloud?
In Surreal Cloud, you pay only for what you use. We want to ensure customers are confident of their usage and costs, avoiding any billing surprises. You will be invoiced monthly based on your usage for that month. Commitment discounts are available upon request, please contact us.