Some people build "graph databases" on top of storage backends that are ill suited for such workloads. e.g you can build a "graph database" (or K/V store) on to

Some people build "graph databases" on top of storage backends that are ill suited for such workloads. e.g you can build a "graph database" (or K/V store) on top of MySQL, but the performance is terrible - http://java.dzone.com/articles/mysql-vs-neo4j-large-scale http://java.dzone.com/articles/mysql-vs-neo4j-large-scale a "native graph database" is one that is actually designed for the task.