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Yep, the "graph databases are too niche to be put into production" bit urked me- Neo4j et al are in plenty of large production systems. OTOH maybe, due to the d
by mhluongo 13y ago
Yep, the "graph databases are too niche to be put into production" bit urked me- Neo4j et al are in plenty of large production systems. OTOH maybe, due to the distributed nature of the project, they didn't want to distribute a less-known database?
- iSnow 13y agoI guess in 2010, Neo4j did not have that much exposure as they have today. Still I concur that the author should not brush graph databases aside for something like a social network - they seem a better solution than a RDBMS.
- twic 13y agoI suspect there isn't actually a lot of need for graph operations in a social network. At least, not in implementing features for the users. A distinctive thing about social networks is that although the users form a network, they are primarily social - they're interacting with their friends. They will end up interacting with friends of friends via their friends (eg having a flamewar with your cousin's neighbour in the comments of your cousin's post about potatoes), but not with friends of friends of friends or any degree of separation further out. The queries needed are overwhelmingly local, and a boring old relational database will handle them fine. Where a graph database might shine is in analytics over the whole network, looking for trends, hubs, clusters, etc, lthough i'm not convinced it would be any better than a relational database which supports recursive queries (as PostgreSQL does). However, this is exactly the sort of privacy-busting awfulness that Diaspora was built to escape from!