Abstract: A Resource Description Framework engine is disclosed for performing transactional RDF-based operations against a distributed database. The RDFE manages a local memory cache that stores active portions of the database, and can synchronize those active portions using a transactionally-coherent distributed cache across all database nodes. During RDF reads, the RDFE can identify a triple-store table affected by a given RDF transaction, and can traverse the index objects for that table to locate triple values that satisfy a given RDF query, without intervening SQL operations. The RDFE can also perform SQL transactions or low-level write operations to update triples in triple-store tables. Thus the RDFE can update corresponding index objects contemporaneous with the insertion of RDF triples, with those updates replicated to all database nodes.