Architecture

AthenaDB is a single engine, built from the ground up. There is no embedded third-party database — the storage format and cryptography are ours end to end, which is what makes them auditable.

The engine

At the core is an encrypted object store with its own indexing and query planner. Everything above — the retrieval surface, the domain packs, the sync layer — is built on that one engine.

One retrieval surface

AthenaDB unifies four retrieval modes behind a single hybrid-RAG query API:

• Keyword / full-text — classic inverted-index search.
• Vector — semantic similarity over embeddings.
• Graph — relationships between entities.
• Timeline — time-ordered retrieval.

A single query can blend these, rather than forcing you to choose one index type.

Form factors

The same engine ships in several shapes:

• Lite — an embeddable single-file mode for desktop and edge.
• Server — a networked instance serving multiple clients.
• Cluster — multi-node scale-out with Sentinel high availability.
• Sync — instance-to-instance replication over the Instance Trust Fabric.

Instance Trust Fabric

Sync and cross-instance queries ride a first-class trust layer rather than ad-hoc credentials. Trust between instances is explicit and verifiable; instance sync is a subset of that broader fabric.