3 ms·

This is a little off topic, but there are so many graph databases out there. It's hard to know which one to start playing with.. One would think that Neo4j pro

This is a little off topic, but there are so many graph databases out there. It's hard to know which one to start playing with.. One would think that Neo4j probably is the most stable one? But it's unclear to me if the full version is open source or not? [1][2] Has anyone tried several? Has anyone tried Dgraph? [3] [1] Community is limited according to Wikipedia [2] Trying to download enterprise takes me to a "Start a Free 30-Day Trial" page [3] https://dgraph.io/ ?

xtracto 8y ago
We wanted to use Neo4j at my last job (in Mexico). However we found the commercial version was prohibitely expensive, and the free version did not work for real life problems. So I think this is a place where open source alternatives would have been welcomed.
staticassertion 8y ago
I've been using Dgraph for my project[0]. I quite like it, but I haven't gotten to the 'running in production' part so I haven't experienced what it's like to actually manage or scale it, only its query language and setup. [0] https://github.com/insanitybit/grapl https://github.com/insanitybit/grapl
alpha_squared 8y ago
We're currently using it and it's got some pros/cons, though the cons are a little scary. Jepsen did an evaluation of Dgraph[0] shortly after we started using it and I can confirm seeing a lot of what was noted. Dgraph is _fast_, but there are problems with the underlying data store (their own DB called Badger). Some of those issues have been remedied, but many still exist. As a graph database, it has some non-typical tradeoffs. You can't easily discern incoming edges and there's no true node deletion. There's a pretty narrow happy-path where the DB works as advertised/expected, but it's just a fairly young DB from an understaffed startup. Probably worth waiting a year or two for the kinks to be ironed out. [0] https://jepsen.io/analyses/dgraph-1-0-2 https://jepsen.io/analyses/dgraph-1-0-2
- mrjn 8y ago
  (author of Dgraph and Badger here) Congrats to Neo4j on the raise! I hope it changes the perception of US VCs w.r.t. graph DBs, who are falling behind the dev enthusiasm and readiness for adoption in this field. As Jepsen report mentioned, it had identified 23 issues, 19 of which were resolved before the report released and another one right after. Dgraph has gone a long way since v1.0 release in terms of production stability. I'd recommend trying out the latest v1.0.9 release or the upcoming v1.0.10. Dgraph itself is close to being launched in production at a few very big and well-known companies (that we can't mention publicly yet), who moved away from Neo4j to Dgraph. Needless to say, Dgraph's performance and scalability far exceed any other graph DB in the market. Dgraph is tackling a lot harder problem of doing distributed joins and traversals, while providing distributed ACID transactions, synchronous replication and linearizable reads. The equivalent of Spanner, which can also do efficient joins (something relational DBs suck at, so technically more complex). There's no graph product out there like this or even a single paper which Dgraph is based on, rather we had to do original research to perfect this technology -- which is why it took time to build and stabilize Dgraph. Badger, the underlying kv DB, itself was never found to have an issue. It is serving several petabytes of data in production use at various companies. We built Jepsen style bank tests for Badger, which run successfully nightly, and there's an open bounty of $1337 for finding any data loss bugs in Badger. Dgraph is decently staffed (7 engineers) for a seed-stage startup, but we're definitely hiring and planning to grow in SF. No need to wait, this is the right time to run Dgraph in production.
  - networked 8y ago
    Regarding performance: have you seen Roi Lipman's RedisGraph presentation (https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/RoiLipman/graph-algebra https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/RoiLipman/graph-algebra)? GraphBLAS is elegant and very promising. There some benchmarks comparing RedisGraph to Neo4j and others at the end of the slides. I would love to see Dgraph benchmarked against RedisGraph the same way.

xtracto 8y ago

We wanted to use Neo4j at my last job (in Mexico). However we found the commercial version was prohibitely expensive, and the free version did not work for real life problems. So I think this is a place where open source alternatives would have been welcomed.

staticassertion 8y ago

I've been using Dgraph for my project[0]. I quite like it, but I haven't gotten to the 'running in production' part so I haven't experienced what it's like to actually manage or scale it, only its query language and setup. [0] https://github.com/insanitybit/grapl https://github.com/insanitybit/grapl

alpha_squared 8y ago

We're currently using it and it's got some pros/cons, though the cons are a little scary. Jepsen did an evaluation of Dgraph[0] shortly after we started using it and I can confirm seeing a lot of what was noted. Dgraph is _fast_, but there are problems with the underlying data store (their own DB called Badger). Some of those issues have been remedied, but many still exist. As a graph database, it has some non-typical tradeoffs. You can't easily discern incoming edges and there's no true node deletion. There's a pretty narrow happy-path where the DB works as advertised/expected, but it's just a fairly young DB from an understaffed startup. Probably worth waiting a year or two for the kinks to be ironed out. [0] https://jepsen.io/analyses/dgraph-1-0-2 https://jepsen.io/analyses/dgraph-1-0-2

mrjn 8y ago
(author of Dgraph and Badger here) Congrats to Neo4j on the raise! I hope it changes the perception of US VCs w.r.t. graph DBs, who are falling behind the dev enthusiasm and readiness for adoption in this field. As Jepsen report mentioned, it had identified 23 issues, 19 of which were resolved before the report released and another one right after. Dgraph has gone a long way since v1.0 release in terms of production stability. I'd recommend trying out the latest v1.0.9 release or the upcoming v1.0.10. Dgraph itself is close to being launched in production at a few very big and well-known companies (that we can't mention publicly yet), who moved away from Neo4j to Dgraph. Needless to say, Dgraph's performance and scalability far exceed any other graph DB in the market. Dgraph is tackling a lot harder problem of doing distributed joins and traversals, while providing distributed ACID transactions, synchronous replication and linearizable reads. The equivalent of Spanner, which can also do efficient joins (something relational DBs suck at, so technically more complex). There's no graph product out there like this or even a single paper which Dgraph is based on, rather we had to do original research to perfect this technology -- which is why it took time to build and stabilize Dgraph. Badger, the underlying kv DB, itself was never found to have an issue. It is serving several petabytes of data in production use at various companies. We built Jepsen style bank tests for Badger, which run successfully nightly, and there's an open bounty of $1337 for finding any data loss bugs in Badger. Dgraph is decently staffed (7 engineers) for a seed-stage startup, but we're definitely hiring and planning to grow in SF. No need to wait, this is the right time to run Dgraph in production.
- networked 8y ago
  Regarding performance: have you seen Roi Lipman's RedisGraph presentation (https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/RoiLipman/graph-algebra https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/RoiLipman/graph-algebra)? GraphBLAS is elegant and very promising. There some benchmarks comparing RedisGraph to Neo4j and others at the end of the slides. I would love to see Dgraph benchmarked against RedisGraph the same way.