lightweight graph databases for prototyping

Question

For prototyping purposes, I'm looking for a lightweight graph database - essentially a graph equivalent for Memcached, Redis or SQLite; something that is trivial to use and deploy (in a JavaScript/Ruby/Python/Go/... environment).

While Neo4j provides everything I want, it's a bit heavyweight for my purposes.

The closest I've found is HeliosJS, though that uses Gremlin whereas I'd prefer Cypher.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Cypher only works with Neo4j, so if you are tied to using it then you are also tied to Neo4j. I'm not aware of any other implementations of that language for any other graph.

For prototyping, I always recommend TinkerGraph with a Gremlin REPL. TinkerGraph is very lightweight and operates as an in-memory graph database. It is the fastest of all Blueprints implementations. I almost always first turn to Gremlin/TinkerGraph when "prototyping", trying a traversal, testing a graphs schema, loading a sample of a dataset, etc., as it provides instant feedback, lots of integration options, and all the power of Groovy for manipulating data. You can read more about the Gremlin REPL as a "workbench for graphs" here.

Update: Note that the above links point to TinkerPop 2.x. TinkerPop 3.x also offers TinkerGraph and the Gremlin Console.