Have you ever seen LinkedIn and wondered how first-degree and second-degree connections are found and displayed on the application? Have you ever observed how you see product recommendations on e-commerce websites like Amazon?
Thanks to Graph databases, the above user experience is enhanced by bringing a lot of personalization to it. Graph databases open a lot of possibilities in terms of data manipulation and visualization. In this article, we will discuss what a graph database is, why it is used, and the 10 best open-source graph databases that businesses and developers could choose from.
What is a Graph Database?
A Graph database is a type of database that uses the concept of graphs to store data. This means that instead of storing data relationally (in the form of tables), a graph database stores data in the form of nodes and edges. Nodes are vertices that store the data, while an edge represents the relationship between nodes.
A simple example of a graph database is a family tree, which describes the members of the family and the relationships between them. Today, graph databases are used by many big corporations in the social media space to represent the various patterns and relationships with their users. They are also used by e-commerce giants to show product recommendations to their users.
Other applications of a graph database include:
- Fraud detection
- Network management
- AI knowledge graphs
- Supply chain mapping
Why is a Graph Database Helpful?
A graph database presents 3 major advantages over a relational database:
- High flexibility: The graph database has a flexible schema as it can change depending on the application without affecting any existing functions.
- High performance: Even with complex transactions, a graph database does not compromise performance. The same is true for deep analytics.
- High efficiency: Unlike a relational database, graph databases are more efficient as the graph queries are shorter, and traversing the relationships is a rapid process.
10 Best Open-Source Graph Databases in 2024
An open-source graph database is a database whose code could be seen by anyone, and they could make contributions to it as well. One popular platform where all the code is uploaded is GitHub. Let’s look at the 10 best open-source graph databases that businesses could use in 2024:
1. Neo4j
One of the most popular and oldest open-source graph databases with over 12,000 stars on GitHub, Neo4j is a native graph database as it implements a graph model right to the storage level. It provides runtime failover, cluster support, and ACID transactions.
Businesses could use AuraDB, a managed cloud service of Neo4j if they do not want to manage and scale the server themselves. Or they could use either a community edition or an enterprise edition. It also includes Cypher, which is a query language similar to SQL and is optimized to be used for graphs. Additionally, there are drivers for programming languages such as JavaScript, .NET, Python, etc.
2. ArangoDB
ArangoDB is an open-source graph database designed for scalability and fast performance. It has over 13,000 stars on GitHub. With only one query language, it mixes an integrated search engine with native graphs, JSON support, and multiple data access patterns.
If businesses want to utilize ArangoDB as a service, they can use the ArangoGraph Insights Platform, a DBaaS. It optimizes performance and reduces all management costs. It ensures that the data is always available, kept up to date without any interruption, and safeguards it.
3. Dgraph
Dgraph is a native graph database that supports native GraphQL and has over 19,000 stars on GitHub. It is a fast, scalable, distributed, and highly available open-source database. Dgraph is made to handle large data sets, and it resolves queries through graph navigation automatically.
Along with this, its queries can use near, within, contain, or intersect geo functions. Dgraph includes full-text search, and strings can be expressed in several languages. Lastly, it is ACID-compliant and fully transactional.
Dgraph offers two cloud cluster instances:
- Shared instance: Fully managed graph database, no need to manage infrastructure.
- Dedicated instance: Supports production workloads and has an option for high availability.
4. Memgraph
With more than 2000 stars on GitHub, Memgraph is an open-source, in-memory graph database that can be used on-premises or in the cloud. Businesses can choose Memgraph Platform, an on-prem version of Memgraph, or Memgraph Cloud, a fully managed service, without any administrator.
It is flexible, highly performant, and supports the availability of data according to industry standards. It is optimized for low latency on both analytical and transactional queries. Moreover, Memgraph ensures that data can be accessed pretty quickly as it keeps the dataset in memory.
It also includes a native C Query Module API, through which developers could make applications capable of high performance. Memgraph also supports seamless integration with Apache Kafka, MySQL, JSON, and CSV.
5. Aerospike Graph
Built on top of the Aerospike Database, Aerospike Graph is a distributed graph database that allows users to store and query large amounts of data without compromising performance. This open-source database uses Apache TinkerPop, a graph computing framework used for online transaction processing and analytical processing of graph queries.
This is a multi-model database that supports data backup and restore. It also supports the massive scalability of billions of vertices, each of which has thousands of edges. It also prevents over-provisioning and over-spending of resources, as its architecture is built in such a way that it can scale independently. It offers a 60-day free trial period for users who want to get started with this database.
6. OrientDB
OrientDB is a fast, flexible, versatile, and reliable graph database with over 4500 stars on GitHub. It is a multi-model database that supports graph, document, full-text and geospatial models. Along with this, it requires no run-time JOINs, which are quite expensive. This database has support for SQL and ACID transactions too.
OrientDB is written in Java programming language and has the ability to run on any platform without installation. Scalability is top-notch in this database as it can store up to billions of records on a single server or several nodes.
7. Cayley
Inspired by Google’s Knowledge Graph, Cayley is an open-source graph database with over 14,000 stars on GitHub. The database is written in Go is built with RDF support and works on top of any existing database, no matter if it is a SQL or a NoSQL data model.
Cayley is highly modular as the user can connect this database to any programming language and extend it with new query languages or any custom logic. It has a built-in query editor and multiple query languages such as GraphQL and MQL. Currently, Cayley is used by several businesses, so it makes this database an ideal choice for production-ready applications.
8. Virtuoso
With over 800 stars on GitHub, Virtuoso is an open-source graph database built by OpenLink. It is a multi-model database management system (DBMS) as well as a data virtualization platform. This database provides high scalability, performance, and availability without depending on complex queries and usage loads.
Virtuoso can be used on social networking sites and recommendation engines as the data can be stored in the form of a graph showcasing relationships, which is, in turn, fast, cost-effective, and preserves privacy. All of this enhances the personalization experience for the user. It can also be used by a business to discover new talents or enhance a skill set.
9. JanusGraph
JanusGraph has over 5,000 stars on GitHub and is a project that comes under The Linux Foundation. It is a highly scalable graph database capable of handling huge graphs with billions of nodes and edges spread across a multi-machine cluster. It supports complex traversals and graph queries.
JanusGraph has advanced search capabilities, such as full-text search, which can be supported via Apache Solr and Apache Lucene. It also has support for multiple visualization tools, such as Arcade Analytics and Cytoscape. In addition, it is also ACID-compliant.
10. HyperGraphDB
HyperGraphDB is an extensible open-source database based on directed hypergraphs. It supports customizable indexing and features powerful data modeling and knowledge representation. It is multi-threaded as well as fully transactional, with non-blocking concurrent data write and read operations. This database has over 190 stars on GitHub.
This memory model is mainly used for AI (Artificial Intelligence), and knowledge management and can be utilized as an embedded object-oriented database for Java. Its application components implement several standards and algorithms to provide multiple features.
Conclusion
Open-source graph databases are really helpful, as any developer or user can look at, examine, and contribute to the project if they want to. In this article, we discussed what a graph database is, why it is helpful to use it, and the top 10 open-source graph databases that users could use in 2024. There are numerous open-source graph databases right now, and a lot of new ones will come up thanks to the advancement in technology, but it is important to analyze all databases and choose the one that fits most of the requirements of the user.
