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by roland_nilsson 2002 days ago
Isn't the whole point of graph databases that they can traverse graph edges efficiently by following pointers to nodes, which relational databases can't do? Then it seems a bit strange to implement a graph database on top of a relational database like SQLite?
1 comments
tpoacher 2000 days ago
Tongue in cheek answer, but: No. That is the whole point of "efficient" graph databases. The point of a "graph database" in the more general sense is simply to be a database that uses a graph paradigm.

This is a silly pedantic point to make, but it is not necessarily trivial. E.g. it may be the case that a particular use-case scneario does not require massive efficiency, and has a lot to gain from the simplicity of sqlite. In which case this kind of project is an amazing thing to exist.

And if there is a way to get a valid benchmark comparison against a more traditional "efficient" graph database, then informed decisions can be made.

As a personal anecdote, a friend and I based a graph-based project on neo4j and were very happy ... until it was time to deploy. We then realised the installations involved were highly complex, rarely supported on traditional webhosts, and costs involved for adopting 'formal' commercial solutions were highly prohibitive. Had we known about this project at the time we would have definitely used it instead (at least as a proof of concept; you can always switch to a more efficient database later if you really have to)

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joshspankit 2000 days ago
Just a quick side question: Why not deploy with Docker?

My latest API+multiple frontends application uses Neo4j as the only database and we deployed with Docker (compose) with great success. With the config in git we were able to do the traditional test-new-versions-on-a-branch-before-deploy and everything is solid.

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tpoacher 2000 days ago
It was more along the lines of a website powered by an online database, rather than anything to do with a locally installable client. The webhost provider did not support neo4j, the project was a hobby project so we did not want to buy a professional virtual server, and commercial neo4j-online solutions were prohibitive for what we wanted to do.

I haven't used docker much, but I don't know how it could help here (unless you misunderstood and were referring to locally installable software).

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joshspankit 2000 days ago
I can see the struggle if the requirement was to have it run on the same servers as the existing website, but any linux (or windows) server can run docker containers.

We just ran the backend and web frontend on a single Digital Ocean droplet, scaling as needed (we started with the $5/mo and it was fine)

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