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Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

grafeo.dev

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Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#41
post #4

Does anyone have any experience with this DB? Or context about where it came from? From the commit history it's obvious that this is an AI coded project. It was started a few months ago, 99% of commits are from 1 contributor, and that 1 contributor has some times committed 100,000 lines of code per week. (EDIT: 200,000 lines of code in the first week) I'm not anti-LLM, but I've done enough AI coding to know that one…

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Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#42
post #30

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

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

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?

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#43
post #31

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

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.

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.

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about Andy Pavlo bet here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29737326 Kuzu folks took some of these discussions and implemented them. SIP, ASP joins, factorized joins and WCOJ. Internally it's structured very similar to DuckDB, except for the differences noted above. DuckDB 1.5 implemented sideways information passing (SIP). And LadybugDB is bringing in support for DuckDB node tables. So the idea t…

I wasn't referring to the Pavlo bet but I would make the same one! Poor algorithm and architecture scalability is a serious bottleneck. I was part of a research program working on the fundamental computer science of high-scale graph databases ~15 years ago. Even back then we could show that the architectures you mention couldn't scale even in theory. Just about everyone has been re-hashing the same basic design for d…

> many millions of dollars to anyone who can demonstrate a graph database that can handle a sparse trillion-edge graph.

I wonder why no one has claimed it. It's possible to compress large graphs to 1 byte per edge via Graph reordering techniques. So a trillion scale graph becomes 1TB, which can fit into high end machines.

Obviously it won't handle high write rates and mutations well. But with Apache Arrow based compression, it's certainly possible to handle read-only and read-mostly graphs.

Also the single machine constraint feels artificial. For any columnar database written in the last 5 years, implementing object store support is tablestakes.

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#45
Speaking of embeddable, we just announced cypher syntax for gfql, so the first OSS CPU/GPU cypher query engine you can use on dataframes

Typically used with scaleout DBs like databricks & splunk for analytical apps: security/fraud/event/social data analysis pipelines, ML+AI embedding & enrichment pipelines, etc. We originally built it for the compute-tier gap here to help Graphistry users making embeddable interactive GPU graph viz apps and dashboards and not wanting to add an external graph DB phase into their interactive analytics flows.

Single GPU can do 1B+ edges/s, no need for a DB install, and can work straight on your dataframes / apache arrow / parquet: https://pygraphistry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gfql/benchmark...

We took a multilayer approach to the GPU & vectorization acceleration, including a more parallelism-friendly core algorithm. This makes fancy features pay-as-you-go vs dragging everything down as in most columnar engines that are appearing. Our vectorized core conforms to over half of TCK already, and we are working to add trickier bits on different layers now that flow is established.

The core GFQL engine has been in production for a year or two now with a lot of analyst teams around the world (NATO, banks, US gov, ...) because it is part of Graphistry. The open-source cypher support is us starting to make it easy for others to directly use as well, including LLMs :)

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#46
post #4

Does anyone have any experience with this DB? Or context about where it came from? From the commit history it's obvious that this is an AI coded project. It was started a few months ago, 99% of commits are from 1 contributor, and that 1 contributor has some times committed 100,000 lines of code per week. (EDIT: 200,000 lines of code in the first week) I'm not anti-LLM, but I've done enough AI coding to know that one…

That is a lot of code for what appears to be a vanilla graph database with a conventional architecture. The thing I would be cautious about is that graph database engines in particular are known for hiding many sharp edges without a lot of subtle and sophisticated design. It isn't obvious that the necessary level of attention to detail has been paid here.

It certainly does seem problematic to have a graph database hiding edges, sharp or not

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#47
I wonder if people are using (or intend to use) vibe-coded projects like the one linked.

I mean - I understand, some people have fun looking at new tech no matter the source, but my question is is there a person who would be designated to pick a GraphQL in language and would ignore all the LLM flags and put it in production.

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#48
post #33
post #25

Overwhelmed by the sheer number of graph databases? I released a new site this week that lists and categorises them. https://gdb-engines.com

Did you generate the list using an LLM?

I was inspired by https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24758 and collated their assessment into a table and then just kept adding databases :)

Claude helped a lot but it's all reviewed and curated by me.

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#49
post #4

Does anyone have any experience with this DB? Or context about where it came from? From the commit history it's obvious that this is an AI coded project. It was started a few months ago, 99% of commits are from 1 contributor, and that 1 contributor has some times committed 100,000 lines of code per week. (EDIT: 200,000 lines of code in the first week) I'm not anti-LLM, but I've done enough AI coding to know that one…

Sounds about right for someone who ships fast and iterates. 54 days for a v0 that probably needs refactoring isn't that crazy if the dev has a real DB background. We've all seen open source projects drag on for 3 years without shipping anything, that's not necessarily better

shipping fast matters a lot less than shipping something you actually understand. 200k lines in a week means nobody knows what's in there, including the author. that's not a codebase, it's a liability

Re: Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alternative opinion: * it is possible to write high quality software using GenAI * not using GenAI could mean project won't be competitive in current landscape

> not using GenAI could mean project won't be competitive in current landscape why? this is false in my opinion, iterating fast is not a good indicator of quality nor competitiveness

iterating fast over quality (e.g. refactoring, tests coverage, benchmarks, documentation, trying new nontrivial ideas) is a good indicator of quality.
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