Diffs

patinaDB can show what changed — both for a single engram and between any two points in history.

Single-engram diff

A git-show-style view of one engram: what was created, deleted, and which properties changed (old → new). Repeated SETs on the same property are coalesced, no-op sets are dropped, and prior values are resolved by reconstructing the parent state.

CALL patinadb.diff('<engram-id>')

patinadb ./mygraph diff <engram-id>          # human-readable
patinadb ./mygraph diff <engram-id> --json

MCP: the diff tool.

Range diff (structural)

A structural diff between two reconstructed states — not a replay of the operations between them, but a comparison of the actual graphs at from and to. Use empty (CLI) / None as from to diff against the empty graph.

patinadb ./mygraph diff-range <from-id> <to-id>
patinadb ./mygraph diff-range empty <to-id>

CALL patinadb.diffRange('<from-id>', '<to-id>')

MCP: the diff_range tool.

Move pairing

A naive structural diff reports a node that changed identity as one removed and one added node. The range diff is move-aware: it pairs a removed and an added vertex that share a label and match on an identity property, reporting a single move instead of an add/remove pair.

The identity-property priority list defaults to qualified_name, fqn, name. Override it on the CLI:

# Use `email` then `id` as identity; `none` disables move pairing entirely
patinadb ./mygraph diff-range <from> <to> --identity-props email,id
patinadb ./mygraph diff-range <from> <to> --identity-props none

If two candidates match ambiguously, they are left unpaired (reported as separate add/remove) rather than guessed.

Use case: code indexing

The range diff powers patinadb-indexer, which re-indexes a codebase and reports a real per-run diff of the symbol graph (functions/types added, removed, or moved) — even though the writes go through query() and don’t produce per-engram deltas. That’s exactly what structural, move-aware diffing is for.