Performance of Graph vs. Relational databases

Question

I am working on a project where tons of graph operations are performed in near real-time. We are currently using Hibernate, MySQL and EhCache but considering moving all the graph-related persistence to a graph database like Neo4j or Titan.

Can graph databases perform better than Hibernate+relational? I just want to make sure we are not going to replace six of one with half a dozen of the other.

Answer 1

The deeper the object graph, the more the performance advantage swings to object/graph databases.

Relational database performance drops off markedly with more than seven JOINs.

Geometric systems such as CAD/CAM, with deep object graphs for bills of materials, outperform their relational counterparts.

Relational databases have one huge advantage: relational algebra and a clear separation between the data and the "how" of accessing and manipulating it. But they are not perfect for every problem.