Monthly Archives: January 2023

Jan 11 2023
4 Comments
Cypher, Testing

Bullshit Graph Database Performance Benchmarks

Hey HackerNews, let me just drop my mixtape, checkout my soundcloud and “Death Row” is the label that pays me.

How is the Graph Database category supposed to grow when vendors keep spouting off complete bullshit? I wrote a bit about the ridiculous benchmark Memgraph published last month hoping they would do the right thing and make an attempt at a real analysis. Instead these clowns put it on a banner on top of their home page. So let’s tear into it.

At first I considered replicating it using their own repository, but it’s about 2000 lines of Python and I don’t know Python. Worse still, the work is under a “Business Source License” which states:

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Jan 09 2023
3 Comments
Cypher, Rage, RelationalAI

Death Star Queries in Graph Databases

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope Death Star

In Cypher, we call any unbounded star query a “Death Star” query. You’ll recognize it if you see a star between two brackets in any part of the query:

-[*]-

the deadly pattern of a death star query

The “star” in Cypher means “keep going”, and when it is not bound by a path length -[*..3]- or relationship type(s) -[:KNOWS|FRIENDS*]- it tends to blow up Alderaaning servers. It’s hard to find a valid reason for this query, but its less deadly cousins are very important in graph workloads.

For example when looking at fraud, we may start with a Customer node and ask, which known Fraudulent nodes are within 4 hops away? A Customer HAS an Account that was ACCESSED by a Device that ACCESSED another Account that BELONGS_TO a known Fraudster. A Customer HAS a mailing Address that is very SIMILAR to an Address that BELONGS_TO a Business that is partially OWNED by a known Fraudster. These are just two out of many valid patterns in our graph. Graph databases were designed to handle these kind of queries. The trick is that every node KNOWS its relationships, every node KNOWS how it is connected.

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