C An Introduction to the Graph Ecosystem
The graph ecosystem is one of, if not the fastest growing sector of the database market, according to DB-Engines.com[1]. In the past few years, the number of new offerings in the graph database space is mind boggling and difficult to track. For people new to the graph database space, trying to understand what each one does and where it fits, is a daunting task.
Figure C.1 Graph Database Popularity Change from 2013-2019 from DB-Engines.com
In this book, we focused on a type of graph database known as a labeled property graph database, but we did not dive into how that compares to other offerings in the space and why we chose to focus on that type of graph database for GluttonApp. In this appendix, we hope to provide a high-level overview of the graph ecosystem to offer some context around what every kind of databases does well and how it fits in the overall landscape. We will examine each of the options in enough detail so that you understand how they work, what they do, and why you might or might not chose them for your project.
C.1.1 Database versus Frameworks
At the highest level, the graph database ecosystem is divided into graph frameworks and graph databases. While there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a framework versus a database, we are going to use the following meanings: