Serious question: are there any actually good and useful graph databases that people would trust in production at reasonable scale and are available as a vendor or as open source? eg. not Meta's TAO

▲ gdotv 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

plenty of those - I've had to work with dozens of different graph databases integrating them on https://gdotv.com, save for maybe 1-2 exceptions in the list of supported databases on our website, they're all production ready and either backed by a vendor or open-source (or sometimes both, e.g. Apache AGE for Azure PostgreSQL). There are some technologies that have been around for a long time but really flying under the radar, despite being used a lot in enterprise (e.g. JanusGraph).

▲ cjlm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Serious answer: limiting to just Open Source: JanusGraph, DGraph, Apache AGE, HugeGraph, MemGraph and ArcadeDB all meet that criteria.

	▲	adsharma 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What is open source and what is a graph database are both hotly debated topics. Author of ArcadeDB critiques many nominally open source licenses here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garulli_why-arcadedb-will-nev... What is a graph database is also relevant: `- Does it need index free adjacency? - Does it need to implement compressed sparse rows? - Does it need to implement ACID? - Does translating Cypher to SQL count as a graph database?`

▲ szarnyasg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a difficult question and I would like to avoid giving a direct answer (because I co-lead a nonprofit benchmarking graph databases) but even knowing what you need for a graph database can be a tricky decision. See my FOSDEM 2025 talk, where I tried to make sense of the field:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...

▲ adsharma 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What people perceive as "Facebook production graph" is not just TAO. There is an ecosystem around it and I wrote one piece of it.

Full history here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/brief-history-graphs-facebook...

▲ pphysch 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah: Postgres, etc.

When you actually need to run graph algorithms against your relational data, you export the subset of that data into something like Grafeo (embedded mode is a big plus here) and run your analysis.

	▲	adsharma 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That importing is expensive and prevents you from handling billion scale graphs. It's possible to run cypher against duckdb (soon postgres as well via duckdb's postgres extension) without having to import anything. That's a game changer when everything is in the same process.