Oxibase is an autonomous database management operating system (DBMOS) that embodies a “Modern Mainframe” philosophy: bringing computation directly to data. It aims to become a self-contained computational runtime, providing a complete solution from the management of the hardware to the data management, computation, communications, authentication and authorization.
Core Philosophy:
Oxibase revisits the traditional separation of “application server” and “database server” as an artifact of historical hardware constraints. By co-locating computation and data, the system looks to eliminates complexity, network latency and serialization overhead inherent in distributed architectures. This “computation to data” approach want to enable user-defined business logic in multiple languages and paradigms to execute within transaction scope, directly/close to where data resides thanks to data locality awareness of the system.
Current State:
Right now, Oxibase encloses an embedded relational database with three index types (B-tree, Hash, Bitmap), cost-based query optimization, built-in functions, user-defined functions, and advanced SQL features including window functions, recursive CTEs, and time-travel queries.
Future Vision:
The goal is evolution toward a distributed computational runtime in a unikernel-based system (Leis and Dietrich) that embeds a multiple computational paradigms for fast development and auto-scaling. It aims to revisit some of the ideas behind IBM System i (IBM) with a fresh approach. The goal is to provide storage (everything is a relational object), business-logic (SQL, JS, Python and Rhai), API (REST, gRPC, WebSocket), orchestration, self-monitoring, self-tracing, version-control, authorization, authentication, and encryption through a unified interface in the form of (Cafarella et al.).
The project roadmap outlines a strategic progression, starting with the development of the core experience (Phase 0), as an small embedded system with the goal of providing a self-contained computational experience, providing a comprehensive environment for both development and deployment. The system should provide support to store data, store and execute procedures, debug them, monitor and trace them. This should serve as a demo of the system’s capabilities, to understand if the DevEx is viable.
For detailed information about each phase, see the full roadmap.
Project Goals
- Self-sufficiency: Oxibase aspires to be a fully self-contained computational runtime, providing a comprehensive environment for both development and deployment. The system should provide everything needed within a cohesive environment.
- Strong Opinions: The architecture and feature set are intentionally opinionated, favoring bold, clear principles over generic extensibility. Decisions are made for users to reduce ambiguity and increase focus.
- Learning & Research: Oxibase is a playground for exploring new ideas in database systems, distributed architectures, transactionality, and co-location of data and logic. Continuous learning and disseminating insights are core to the project.
- Heavily Tested: Reliability and correctness matter deeply. Features and infrastructure are expected to be exhaustively tested.
- Accessible for Humans: Readability and clarity of code, configuration, and operation are prioritized—even at the expense of some automation or performance. The system should be understandable by curious practitioners.
Explicit Non-Goals
- Maximum Performance: Raw benchmark performance is not the primary pursuit. Reasonable performance is required, but clarity and correctness take precedence.
- Strict Standards Conformance: While best effort will be made for compatibility (e.g., SQL, network protocols), strict adherence to industry standards is not a goal. Deviations may be made for clarity, simplicity, or research motivations.
- Prioritizing Automation Over Clarity: Design choices that favor ease of maintenance, modification, or explanation—even if that leads to less automation or a “bottleneck” for throughput—will be preferred.
- Generic Extensibility: Oxibase is explicitly not “one size fits all.” It targets specific philosophies and refuses to chase universal flexibility.
New to Oxibase?
If you’re new to Oxibase, we recommend starting with our Quickstart Guide to get up and running quickly.
Need Help?
If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the documentation, you can:
- Open an issue on GitHub
- Join the discussions to ask questions
This documentation is under active development. Please check back regularly for updates.
- Leis, Viktor, and Christian Dietrich. “Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware.” Proceedings of the 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases [Guangzhou, China], 2024, pp. 2115–22, https://doi.org/10.14778/3659437.3659462.
- IBM. IBM i — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2026, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IBM%20i&oldid=1318707147.
- Cafarella, Michael J., et al. “DBOS: A Proposal for a Data-Centric Operating System.” CoRR, abs/2007.11112, 2020, https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11112.