Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL • Hacker News Board

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#11

Post by CharlieDigital » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:24 PM UTC

smidgeon wrote: post #10

manojlds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Cypher was so good and made everything so intuitive. Loved working with Neo4J for a prototype and then had to face the licensing issues and huge costs and had to abandon it.

I got bitten by the same, we were looking at switching to memgraph (which is also Cypher, but C++ rather than Java), sadly abandoned for other reasons ...

What reasons? Would love to know for future ref.

If your org is amenable to Google Spanner or already using Spanner, it has preview support for Cypher and graph semantics: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/graph/overview

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#12

Post by belter » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:25 PM UTC

voodooEntity wrote: post #8

Im a big fan of GraphDatabase's since about 10 years. I even wrote my own "in memory graph storage" in golang for a specific use case that none of the big GraphDatabase's could cover at the time. That said - i WISH people would embrase the existing GraphDatabases more and make the hosters support them as standard, rather than abusing existing relational databases for graph purposes. And to make it clear,i'm not talki…

When you look at AWS Neptune database implementation details, it looks realy close to the Aurora backend... :-)

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/migrati...

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#13

Post by simpaticoder » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

yonisto wrote: post #6

This time it must be me... Bilbo is not Frodo's father (Frodo is actually Bilbo's first and second cousin, once removed)

Very good, and also Frodo refers to Bilbo as his "uncle".

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#14

Post by simpaticoder » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

"CTE" refers to Postgres' "common table expression" syntax, the "WITH" keyword. See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#15

Post by SJC_Hacker » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

voodooEntity wrote: post #8

Im a big fan of GraphDatabase's since about 10 years. I even wrote my own "in memory graph storage" in golang for a specific use case that none of the big GraphDatabase's could cover at the time. That said - i WISH people would embrase the existing GraphDatabases more and make the hosters support them as standard, rather than abusing existing relational databases for graph purposes. And to make it clear,i'm not talki…

The only problem with representing graphs on an RDBMS is the queries. So whats the big issue if queries are added which can handle the graph cases?

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#16

Post by eatonphil » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

I thought this was going to be about querying a Postgres table with a graph query language (SQL/PGQ).

Indeed this is coming to Postgres eventually.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/a855795d-e697-4fa...

https://ashutoshpg.blogspot.com/2024/04/dbaag-with-sqlpgq.ht...

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#17

Post by robertclaus » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

I've found the main advantage to this over a more specialized graph database is integration and maintenance alongside the rest of your application. Real world data is rarely just (or even mostly) graph data.

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#18

Post by voodooEntity » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:41 PM UTC

belter wrote: post #12

voodooEntity wrote: post #8

Im a big fan of GraphDatabase's since about 10 years. I even wrote my own "in memory graph storage" in golang for a specific use case that none of the big GraphDatabase's could cover at the time. That said - i WISH people would embrase the existing GraphDatabases more and make the hosters support them as standard, rather than abusing existing relational databases for graph purposes. And to make it clear,i'm not talki…

When you look at AWS Neptune database implementation details, it looks realy close to the Aurora backend... :-) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/migrati...

Hrhr very true.

Also, the last time i checked neptune, it could only be run in AWS but there was no public application image for local tinkering/dev. But its some years ago to be fair - maybe have changed.

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#19

Post by voodooEntity » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #15

voodooEntity wrote: post #8

Im a big fan of GraphDatabase's since about 10 years. I even wrote my own "in memory graph storage" in golang for a specific use case that none of the big GraphDatabase's could cover at the time. That said - i WISH people would embrase the existing GraphDatabases more and make the hosters support them as standard, rather than abusing existing relational databases for graph purposes. And to make it clear,i'm not talki…

The only problem with representing graphs on an RDBMS is the queries. So whats the big issue if queries are added which can handle the graph cases?

Thats like saying why do we need json we can represent it also in a textfile but accessing values can be more tricky.

Sure you can represent a GraphDB in a RDBMS - but graphdbs are optimized for their specific use case. Therefor for example locking of resources is optimized for said purpose. When going a "Edge" and "Node" table approach, locking is by default rather unoptimized in many RDBMS. Just one simple example.

Re: Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL

#20

Post by gunalx » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #16

I thought this was going to be about querying a Postgres table with a graph query language (SQL/PGQ). Indeed this is coming to Postgres eventually. https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/a855795d-e697-4fa... https://ashutoshpg.blogspot.com/2024/04/dbaag-with-sqlpgq.ht...

Like apache age (postgres with cypher support) https://age.apache.org/