8 ms·

List of graph databases

88 points by helwr 15y ago

helwr 15y ago
also http://nosql-database.org/ http://nosql-database.org/
derefr 15y ago
A question I haven't been able to answer from all this: is there, as of yet, a portable graph database library, ala SQLite, that can be used as a file format for graph-based data?
- elviejo 15y ago
  You aré looping for neo4j. It is beautiful.
  - derefr 15y ago
    I'm not quite sure; I was imagining something with a small C API like SQLite's (which can usually be incorporated into anything), whereas Neo4j requires the JVM. This means, for example, that if I want to write a Ruby app that interacts with the graph database, it has to become a JRuby app. I suppose a service-based architecture could avoid this (where only the process interacting with the graph has to be run on the JVM), but that defeats the whole purpose of using a database library rather than a client-server database. I suppose it works well enough for languages that are already founded on the JVM, such as Clojure—but that doesn't make it universally portable to systems that don't even have a JVM implementation (such as iOS), in the way that SQLite is.
    - elviejo 15y ago
      If you want to write a Ruby App you just use Neo4j with their Rest API. You are right in all the other points though.
  - floppydisk 15y ago
    I've used neo4j for a project a while ago. Once you got past the documentation, it was cool to work on and see data transactions happening without having to write code for processing RDBMS data. I haven't looked at it or used it in a while so I can't speak to their current state, but when I used it, they had a bit of a learning curve for getting up to speed. Particularly, some of their code examples were a little off so I had to spend a couple of days researching to figure out why the project compiled but nothing ended up in the database.
    - espeed 15y ago
      Neo4j has recently added support for two new query languages -- Gremlin and Cypher. Gremlin is a domain specific scripting/traversal language written in Groovy, and you can include a Gremlin script in whatever language you're writing code in just like you can include an SQL script in your code. Cypher is brand new and experimental.
- floppydisk 15y ago
  I do not think one exists yet. Most of these are built on non-portable stacks and would require you to either build an app on that stack or run a client-server setup.
- espeed 15y ago
  TinkerGraph is close (https://github.com/tinkerpop/blueprints/wiki/TinkerGraph https://github.com/tinkerpop/blueprints/wiki/TinkerGraph) -- it used to be an in-memory only graph, but you can now persist it. Also look at GraphML (http://graphml.graphdrawing.org http://graphml.graphdrawing.org) and the full TinkerPop stack (http://www.tinkerpop.com http://www.tinkerpop.com). Gremlin (https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki) is a graph query lanaguage and one of the main discussions groups for general graph database stuff is the Gremlin Users group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gremlin-users https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gremlin-users) -- ask your question about the portable library in there -- the group was created by Marko, the guy who wrote TinkerGraph. Here's a 10 min screencast on Gremlin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E Rexster (https://github.com/tinkerpop/rexster/wiki/ https://github.com/tinkerpop/rexster/wiki/) is a REST server that has Gremlin built in, and it interfaces with most of the graph databases, Neo4j, DEX, OrientDB, etc. There is an open-source Python persistence framework in the works called Bulbs that connects to Neo4j through the Rexster REST server, and there are binary bindings in the works as well. There is also a Python open-source Web development framework for graph databases called Bulbflow that is based on Bulbs and Flask. Both frameworks should be released in the next few weeks.
- chrislo 15y ago
  There's RedStore, "a lightweight RDF triplestore written in C using the Redland library". http://www.aelius.com/njh/redstore/ http://www.aelius.com/njh/redstore/
- buro9 15y ago
  I've used Sones for this, but it does require .Net so it depends on how portable you need it to be. Within the MS ecosystem it works fine.
r00fus 15y ago
Had to go look this one up just to find out the pros/cons of graph databases vs. SQL and other NoSQL databases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database It'd be nice if the information presented here would eventually merge with the wikipedia entry.
- espeed 15y ago
  Graphs are a much more elegant way of storing relational data. With graph databases you don't have to mess with tables or joins -- everything is implicitly joined. And Neo4j rocks -- store 32 billion nodes (http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/03/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-m04-size-really.html http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/03/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-m04-size...) with 2 million traversals per second (http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/02/neo4j-10 http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/02/neo4j-10), and you can use Gremlin with it (the graph traversal language), which let's you calculate PageRank in 2 lines. Neo4j is open source, and the Community Edition is now free (https://github.com/neo4j/community https://github.com/neo4j/community). I recommend pairing it with the TinkerPop stack (http://www.tinkerpop.com/ http://www.tinkerpop.com/). For tabular data, relational databases rock. But the relational model doesn't align well with object-orientated programming so you have an ORM layer that adds complexity to your code. And with relational databases, the complexity of your schema grows with the complexity of the data. The graph-database model simplifies much of this and makes working with the modern-day social graph so much cleaner. Graphs allow you to do powerful things like find inferences inside the data in ways that would be hard to do with relational databases. Check out Peter Neubauer's introduction to graph databases and how they compare to RDBMS' and where they stand in the NOSQL-movement (http://www.infoq.com/articles/graph-nosql-neo4j http://www.infoq.com/articles/graph-nosql-neo4j). Marko's website is a great resource too (http://markorodriguez.com/ http://markorodriguez.com/) -- he created Gremlin, the graph query language.
  - rb2k_ 15y ago
    What I always find hard to understand is that when you "query" a graph database, you have to start at a certain node. User: Name: John Age: 43 Country: Sweden Job: SoftwareEngineer What if I wanted to get the names of all software engineers in sweden? Do I have to create a type of "job" node and start traversing from the one that is for software engineer's? Also: Is sorting possible at all with graph databases? What if I only want people called John that are older than 20? Is this too far out of scope for Graph Databases?
amurmann 15y ago
I am surprised by the large number of databases in the list that's written in Java. I would have expected that something performance critical, like a DB would be written in C. Is it typical these days to a database in Java? Are there any well known DBs written in Java?
michael_dorfman 15y ago
Actually, this is a list of graph database management systems. I was hoping for a list of graph databases, like Knuth's The Stanford Graphbase, which is something completely different.
jot 15y ago
Surprised Dydra isn't mentioned: http://dydra.com http://dydra.com
- mark_l_watson 15y ago
  I am not sure how active they are. I asked for a beta invitation a long time ago, no response.
SigmundA 15y ago
They forgot to list CODASYL.
lucian1900 15y ago
A bit odd that it doesn't mention ZODB. It's a pretty popular/successful graph/object database.

88 points by helwr 15y ago

helwr 15y ago

also http://nosql-database.org/ http://nosql-database.org/

A question I haven't been able to answer from all this: is there, as of yet, a portable graph database library, ala SQLite, that can be used as a file format for graph-based data?

elviejo 15y ago
You aré looping for neo4j. It is beautiful.
- derefr 15y ago
  I'm not quite sure; I was imagining something with a small C API like SQLite's (which can usually be incorporated into anything), whereas Neo4j requires the JVM. This means, for example, that if I want to write a Ruby app that interacts with the graph database, it has to become a JRuby app. I suppose a service-based architecture could avoid this (where only the process interacting with the graph has to be run on the JVM), but that defeats the whole purpose of using a database library rather than a client-server database. I suppose it works well enough for languages that are already founded on the JVM, such as Clojure—but that doesn't make it universally portable to systems that don't even have a JVM implementation (such as iOS), in the way that SQLite is.
  - elviejo 15y ago
    If you want to write a Ruby App you just use Neo4j with their Rest API. You are right in all the other points though.
- floppydisk 15y ago
  I've used neo4j for a project a while ago. Once you got past the documentation, it was cool to work on and see data transactions happening without having to write code for processing RDBMS data. I haven't looked at it or used it in a while so I can't speak to their current state, but when I used it, they had a bit of a learning curve for getting up to speed. Particularly, some of their code examples were a little off so I had to spend a couple of days researching to figure out why the project compiled but nothing ended up in the database.
  - espeed 15y ago
    Neo4j has recently added support for two new query languages -- Gremlin and Cypher. Gremlin is a domain specific scripting/traversal language written in Groovy, and you can include a Gremlin script in whatever language you're writing code in just like you can include an SQL script in your code. Cypher is brand new and experimental.
floppydisk 15y ago
I do not think one exists yet. Most of these are built on non-portable stacks and would require you to either build an app on that stack or run a client-server setup.
espeed 15y ago
TinkerGraph is close (https://github.com/tinkerpop/blueprints/wiki/TinkerGraph https://github.com/tinkerpop/blueprints/wiki/TinkerGraph) -- it used to be an in-memory only graph, but you can now persist it. Also look at GraphML (http://graphml.graphdrawing.org http://graphml.graphdrawing.org) and the full TinkerPop stack (http://www.tinkerpop.com http://www.tinkerpop.com). Gremlin (https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki) is a graph query lanaguage and one of the main discussions groups for general graph database stuff is the Gremlin Users group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gremlin-users https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gremlin-users) -- ask your question about the portable library in there -- the group was created by Marko, the guy who wrote TinkerGraph. Here's a 10 min screencast on Gremlin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E Rexster (https://github.com/tinkerpop/rexster/wiki/ https://github.com/tinkerpop/rexster/wiki/) is a REST server that has Gremlin built in, and it interfaces with most of the graph databases, Neo4j, DEX, OrientDB, etc. There is an open-source Python persistence framework in the works called Bulbs that connects to Neo4j through the Rexster REST server, and there are binary bindings in the works as well. There is also a Python open-source Web development framework for graph databases called Bulbflow that is based on Bulbs and Flask. Both frameworks should be released in the next few weeks.
chrislo 15y ago
There's RedStore, "a lightweight RDF triplestore written in C using the Redland library". http://www.aelius.com/njh/redstore/ http://www.aelius.com/njh/redstore/
buro9 15y ago
I've used Sones for this, but it does require .Net so it depends on how portable you need it to be. Within the MS ecosystem it works fine.

r00fus 15y ago

Had to go look this one up just to find out the pros/cons of graph databases vs. SQL and other NoSQL databases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database It'd be nice if the information presented here would eventually merge with the wikipedia entry.

espeed 15y ago
Graphs are a much more elegant way of storing relational data. With graph databases you don't have to mess with tables or joins -- everything is implicitly joined. And Neo4j rocks -- store 32 billion nodes (http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/03/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-m04-size-really.html http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/03/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-m04-size...) with 2 million traversals per second (http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/02/neo4j-10 http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/02/neo4j-10), and you can use Gremlin with it (the graph traversal language), which let's you calculate PageRank in 2 lines. Neo4j is open source, and the Community Edition is now free (https://github.com/neo4j/community https://github.com/neo4j/community). I recommend pairing it with the TinkerPop stack (http://www.tinkerpop.com/ http://www.tinkerpop.com/). For tabular data, relational databases rock. But the relational model doesn't align well with object-orientated programming so you have an ORM layer that adds complexity to your code. And with relational databases, the complexity of your schema grows with the complexity of the data. The graph-database model simplifies much of this and makes working with the modern-day social graph so much cleaner. Graphs allow you to do powerful things like find inferences inside the data in ways that would be hard to do with relational databases. Check out Peter Neubauer's introduction to graph databases and how they compare to RDBMS' and where they stand in the NOSQL-movement (http://www.infoq.com/articles/graph-nosql-neo4j http://www.infoq.com/articles/graph-nosql-neo4j). Marko's website is a great resource too (http://markorodriguez.com/ http://markorodriguez.com/) -- he created Gremlin, the graph query language.
- rb2k_ 15y ago
  What I always find hard to understand is that when you "query" a graph database, you have to start at a certain node. User: Name: John Age: 43 Country: Sweden Job: SoftwareEngineer What if I wanted to get the names of all software engineers in sweden? Do I have to create a type of "job" node and start traversing from the one that is for software engineer's? Also: Is sorting possible at all with graph databases? What if I only want people called John that are older than 20? Is this too far out of scope for Graph Databases?

amurmann 15y ago

I am surprised by the large number of databases in the list that's written in Java. I would have expected that something performance critical, like a DB would be written in C. Is it typical these days to a database in Java? Are there any well known DBs written in Java?

michael_dorfman 15y ago

Actually, this is a list of graph database management systems. I was hoping for a list of graph databases, like Knuth's The Stanford Graphbase, which is something completely different.

jot 15y ago

Surprised Dydra isn't mentioned: http://dydra.com http://dydra.com

mark_l_watson 15y ago
I am not sure how active they are. I asked for a beta invitation a long time ago, no response.

SigmundA 15y ago

They forgot to list CODASYL.

lucian1900 15y ago

A bit odd that it doesn't mention ZODB. It's a pretty popular/successful graph/object database.