Database Configuration

LAPIS and SILO need a database_config.yaml. It’s main purpose is to define the database schema for the sequence metadata. See the tutorial for an example, or use our config generator to generate your own config. More examples can be found in our tests.

The database config is considered static configuration that doesn’t change with data updates. This page contains the technical specification of the database config.

The Schema Object

The database_config.yaml must contain a schema object on top level. It permits the following fields:

Key	Type	Required	Description
instanceName	string	true	The name assigned to the instance. Only used for diplay purposes.
metadata	array	true	A list of metadata objects that is available on the underlying sequence data.
opennessLevel	enum	true	Possible values: OPEN. To be extended in the future.
primaryKey	string	true	The field that serves as the primary key in SILO for the data.
dateToSortBy	string	false	The field used to sort the data by date. Queries on this column will be faster.
partitionBy	string	false	The field used to partition the data. Used by SILO for overall query optimization.
features	array	false	A list of feature objects.

Tip

If you have a pango lineage column in your metadata, make use of the partitionBy feature. SILO will partition the data according to the lineage, which will speed up queries, since querying can be parallelized.

Tip

If you anticipate that users will query for a certain date column more often, it will be beneficial to set dateToSortBy to that column.

The Metadata Object

The metadata object permits the following fields:

Key	Type	Required	Description
name	string	true	The name of the feature.
type	enum	true	The type of the metadata.
generateIndex	boolean	false	See Generating an index below

Metadata Types

SILO currently supports the following metadata types:

• string
• int
• float
• pango_lineage: Systematic classification of lineage with inheritance structure that can be computed for some pathogens. Also see here .
• date: Values must be valid dates in the form YYYY-MM-DD.
• insertion: A comma separated list of nucleotide insertions. Each insertion has the form <segment>:<position>:<symbols>. Example value: segment1:123:CCG,segment2:501:AAAGGG. If there is only one segment, the segment name can be omitted: 123:CCG,501:AAAGGG.
• aaInsertion: A comma separated list of amino acid insertions. Each insertion has the form <gene>:<position>:<symbols>. Example value: S:123:CCG,ORF1A:501:AAAGGG.

Generating an Index

Columns of type string support generating an index. For columns of type pango_lineage, an index is always generated. SILO internally stores precomputed bitmaps for those columns so that a query on that column becomes a trivial lookup.

Tip

Generating an index makes most sense for columns with many equal values, since it increases the compression ratio and thus decreases memory consumption of SILO.

Features

The feature object permits the following fields:

Key	Type	Required	Description
name	string	true	The name of the feature.

Currently, there is only one available feature: sarsCoV2VariantQuery. This enables a specialized query language for SARS-CoV-2 instances.

See variant queries.