Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tschellenbach 1812 days ago
I also don't see many valid use cases for graph databases.
5 comments

Marketing and fraud detection are pretty valid imo. Just inherently hard to scale.

I do think there's a valid question of how useful n-hop queries are for an N that is greater than 2 or 3.

There is a lot - customer support (aka customer 360), fraud detection, some maintenance cases, inventory, recommendations, etc. But it’s heavily dependent on requirements - what should be response time. Most of graph databases are good in fast response time, but will do it only for 2-3 hops from known start points. For many other things, graph analytics with Spark or something like could be better
2-3 hops (JOINs) is well within RDBMS territory, no?
Yes. But it’s not a very exciting solution so people keep trying graph db’s.
They are great for data exploration, data science, analytics, etc. I would NOT put one as a dependency on a user experience though.
Have you tried getting grants promising they will deliver? </s>
> I also don't see many valid use cases for graph databases.

It's the most general purpose means I can see to model entities. I can't see many invalid uses.