Memgraph VS Druid

Memgraph | Staff C++ Database Engineer | REMOTE (Central/Western Europe, LatAm, or North America) https://memgraph.com/

Memgraph is a Seed stage, open source graph database vendor. Graph DBs are a great solution for GenAI, logistics, cybersecurity and fintech so we are looking to grow aggressively this year.

We're looking for a staff-level engineer to set technical direction, mentor junior team members, and solve some very difficult problems.

Either DM me (the hiring manager) or apply here: https://join.com/companies/memgraph/10684850-staff-software-...

It's not possible to escape tradeoffs. To deal with tradeoffs, focus is important. API to tradeoffs is also important.

I bet somebody will raise a similar question in a few years time when the list under https://db-engines.com/en/ranking/graph+dbms will be bigger.

DISCLAIMER: Coming from https://github.com/memgraph/memgraph

Albeit the significant engineering endeavor, the larger-than-memory architecture is a super valuable asset to Memgraph users since it allows them to store large amounts of data cheaply on disk without sacrificing the performance of in-memory computation. We are actively working on resolving issues introduced with the new storage mode, so feel free to ask, open an issue, or pull a request. We will be more than happy to help. Until next time 🫡

NoSQL databases are non-relational databases with flexible schema designed for high performance at a massive scale. Unlike traditional relational databases, which use tables and predefined schemas, NoSQL databases use a variety of data models. There are 4 main types of NoSQL databases - document, graph, key-value, and column-oriented databases. NoSQL databases generally are well-suited for unstructured data, large-scale applications, and agile development processes. The most popular examples of NoSQL databases are MongoDB (document), Memgraph (graph), Redis (key-value store) and Apache HBase (column-oriented).

Whether it's about identifying similar user profiles in a social network, detecting similar patterns in a communication network, or classifying nodes in a semantic network, cosine similarity contributes valuable insights. Combined with a powerful graph database system, such as Memgraph, it gives a better understanding of complex networks. Memgraph is an open-source in-memory graph database built to handle real-time use cases at an enterprise scale. Memgraph supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions and uses the standardized Cypher query language for structuring, manipulating, and exploring data.

It should be noted this article is on the blog of a project which advertises itself as open source, under a BSL license that puts limitations on distribution and use.

At the moment, benchgraph is a project under Memgraph repository (previously Mgbench). It consists of Python scripts and a C++ client. Python scripts are used to manage the benchmark execution by preparing the workload, configurations, and so on, while the C++ client actually executes the benchmark.

These five steps will result in something similar to this simplified version of demo.py example:

Take a look at this blog post about choosing the optimal index. It focuses on Memgraph graph database but it offers a theoretical background that is not vendor related.

In this tutorial, we will utilize betweenness centrality for identifying essential proteins. For this task, we are using Memgraph, a graph analytics platform, which can perform complex graph analysis on all sorts of networks. Even though we will use betweenness centrality, other graph algorithms can also be applied to the protein-protein interaction network, such as other centrality measures or the PageRank algorithm.

Apache Druid

Apache Druid: Focused on real-time analytics and interactive queries on large datasets. Druid is well-suited for high-performance applications in user-facing analytics, network monitoring, and business intelligence.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in maintaining the freshness of results. The query in the streaming database focuses on recent data, making it suitable for continuous monitoring. Using streaming databases, you can run queries like finding the top 10 sold products where the “top 10 product list” might change in real-time.

https://github.com/apache/druid

It's always a question of tradeoffs.

The awesome-selfhosted project has a nice list of open-source analytics projects. It's really good inspiration to dig into these projects and find out about the technology choices that other open-source tools in the space have made.

Spencer Kimball (now CEO at CockroachDB) wrote an interesting article on this topic in 2021 where they created spencerkimball/stargazers based on a Python script. So I started thinking: could I create a data pipeline using Nifi and Kafka (two OSS tools often used with Druid) to get the API data into Druid - and then use SQL to do the analytics? The answer was yes! And I have documented the outcome below. Here’s my analytical pipeline for Github stars data using Nifi, Kafka and Druid.

Apache Druid is part of the modern data architecture. It uses a special data format designed for analytical workloads, using extreme parallelisation to get data in and get data out. A shared-nothing, microservices architecture helps you to build highly-available, extreme scale analytics features into your applications.

Apache Druid

But then you realize there are other databases out there focused specifically on analytical use cases with lots of data and complex queries. Newcomers like ClickHouse, Pinot, and Druid (all open source) respond to a new class of problem: The need to develop applications using endpoints published on analytical queries that were previously confined only to the data warehouse and BI tools.

Datadog's product is a bit too close to Apache Druid to have named their design system so similarly.

From https://druid.apache.org/ :

> Druid unlocks new types of queries and workflows for clickstream, APM, supply chain, network telemetry, digital marketing, risk/fraud, and many other types of data. Druid is purpose built for rapid, ad-hoc queries on both real-time and historical data.

Maybe rare for someone to be seeking their first coding job at that age. But plenty of us are in our 50s or older and still coding up a storm. And not necessarily ancient tech or anything. My current project exposes analytics data from Apache Druid and Cassandra via Go microservices hosted in K8s.