For the scalability side of graph, we've just started using Amazon Neptune RDF, ...

staticassertion · on Feb 16, 2019

Where Neptune appears to fall down is write performance. This is what made it non-viable for me. I have colleagues who are struggling / hacking around the write performance issues.

DGraph's write perf seems to be considerably better - I haven't benchmarked formally, just going off of discussions I've had with others.

mrjn · on Feb 16, 2019

As others mention, Neptune is based on Blazegraph. It is a layer on top of Amazon Aurora and has the typical graph layer issues I mention my blog post (in particular the join depth problem).

When Neptune was launched, I wrote another article critiquing its design. Worth a read: https://blog.dgraph.io/post/neptune/

pbowyer · on Feb 16, 2019

I'd missed the announcement of Neptune, so thanks for alerting me. Have you reviewed the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, with its graph access layer?

mrjn · on Feb 16, 2019

I haven't. But, the design is the same. Graph layer on top of another DB, because they didn't want to invest in building a native graph DB.

In general, that approach doesn't lead to good performance, as I explained in the blog post.

blurbleblurble · on Feb 16, 2019

FYI, Neptune is based on Blazegraph. Amazon's acquisition of Blazegraph halted the database's open development. I'm sure they would welcome interested contributors: https://github.com/blazegraph/database/issues/86

gibsonf1 · on Feb 16, 2019

I actually found out about Neptune through finding out about Blazegraph. Do you know what's happening with the Blazegraph project now?

Just followed your link and saw this comment from one of the original authors in Jan: https://github.com/blazegraph/database/issues/86#issuecommen...

Since Amazon is effectively selling machine time to run Neptune with no cost for the db, wouldn't it be excellent if the original author and team continued to contribute to Blazegraph. I'm not sure if the linked note is a potential nod in that direction or not. (We have customers that also want to have on-prem deployments, which you obviously can't do with Neptune)