If you don't require a server environment, having direct access to data that resides in memory or on your local machine will obviously be faster. But, whether t

If you don't require a server environment, having direct access to data that resides in memory or on your local machine will obviously be faster. But, whether this is an option depends on your use case -- if Neo4j is backing your load-balanced Web servers, this isn't really an option, but you could create a local mirror of the database for running queries (similar to OLTP vs OLAP systems). Gremlin is really just Groovy with domain-specific constructs. You can write multi-line Gremlin/Groovy scripts that apply complex filters and send them to the external server. You can also use any JVM langauge to create the equivalent of stored procedures on the server to pull data from multiple sources. Another approach would be to query the external server and use TinkerGraph to keep a local in-memory cache, lazy-loading it as needed.