> how to choose a platform among the offerings (licensing being I think a key issue, I've heard Neo4J can get expensive) Safest bet (knowing nothing else about

> how to choose a platform among the offerings (licensing being I think a key issue, I've heard Neo4J can get expensive) Safest bet (knowing nothing else about your needs): Build at least three prototypes, preferably rapidly and in parallel. Only after doing so will you be able to ask the right questions that speak accurately to your specific needs and therefore be able to map actual requirements to the different graph databases. I’d be curious what other experienced graph database people would say about their first bigger projects. Looking back, my first graph projects involved significant iteration and several restarts. And these were still necessary after having significant background knowledge about the algorithms, offerings, and trade offs. There are many people in roles/orgs that don’t have the humility or organizational cover to admit that these early projects are largely experimental learning experiences. > ...assume a large, "social media" scale system, to be safe. This broad assumption is going to cost you. Instead, I’d encourage you to reframe this assumption in more specific terms such as read, write patterns; need for consistency, availability; support expectations; your talent pool; and lots more. Estimates can be on a log10 scale: 1, 10, 100, 1000 and so on,