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by yawboakye 832 days ago
graph databases win on actual data layouts in disk blocks. trying to make relational databases ‘understand’ graphs really happens only at the query language layer. the data on disk remains optimized for relational queries. i’m not aware of any relational database shipping a storage engine optimized for graphs. if you know any, please share. thanks :)
3 comments

There's more potential applicability/overlap for columnar relational engines (vs. row stores) - this 2023 paper offers some useful background: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.08702.pdf
On the other hand, nearly everybody’s data fits in RAM nowadays, and NVMe is so fast the disk layout constraints have changed a lot. So maybe now’s a good time to rethink anyway.
But only if the data is valuable enough to cover the (much) higher costs that come with those assumptions.