Ask HN: Anyone use graph db in production/at scale? Like Neo4j or Arangodb?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695570

by moomoo11 • 2 years ago

4 6 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Please share any experiences. I'm specifically evaluating Neo4j and my sandbox testing is going well so far but I'm curious to hear from people who have far more experience.

FWIW I have a graph use case implemented with pg where I'm running into issues with recursive queries, whereas the neo4j queries are far better performant and easier to reason.

cpach• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, what’s your problem domain?

moomoo112• 2 years ago

Parts. Like auto or industrial parts and being able to assign them to specific lots and customer specific groupings etc.

nborwankar• 2 years ago

This is related to a classic relational database problem called “bill of materials problem” - suggest you Google that. Also look for book on Graphs and networks in SQL by Joe Celko where he goes into modeling graphs in SQL tables. Naive formulations will lead to deeply nested joins which balloon in computational cost.

goralph• 2 years ago

Without knowing the specifics of your data model I'd wager what you have is a data modelling problem not a graph problem. Maybe start with that?

There's a reason these graph DBs are esoteric. They're fun & cool to use but there's not a lot of problems they can solve better than a relational DB.

throwaway38375• 2 years ago

Worked at a place where the lead engineer was adamant a graph database was the solution. After two years of trying to get it launched, the project failed spectacularly.

Another team got given the rewrite and build it in six months using MySQL.

Ask HN: Anyone use graph db in production/at scale? Like Neo4j or Arangodb?

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