I wonder if there's a design decision documented somewhere that makes the existing graph databases like Neo4j, etc. not good enough for Youtrack's use case.
Didn't Neo4J pivot away from being a boring embedded DB which you point at a path and then traverse through Node objects, and decide to become some kind of paid platform with a client-server protocol and proprietary query DSL?
I remembered it from a uni course (early 10s?) a few years ago for a use-case we didn't end up pursuing, but I wasn't hugely comfortable with investing effort into what I saw.
Neo4j is a great DB but their license price is egregious for enterprise customers. A few years ago I was involved in negotiating a contract for a small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores) and the annual price was more than the salary of a senior SWE full-time equivalent. See this page for an idea of their prices in 2018: https://blog.igovsol.com/2018/01/10/Neo4j-Commercial-Prices....
> small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores
That's ~1 machine. 1 SWE for a database isn't egregious, databases provide huge value, but for that little performance, that's crazy.
I can only assume as core count has blown up over the last 10 years, the pricing has somewhat diminished, but still, I'd be expecting a heck of a lot more capacity for 1 SWE.
Also embedding Neo4j is not possible, that seems to be the killer feature for YouTrackDB, they even shade dependencies so it’s like a no deps Java library for your application.
I remembered it from a uni course (early 10s?) a few years ago for a use-case we didn't end up pursuing, but I wasn't hugely comfortable with investing effort into what I saw.
That's ~1 machine. 1 SWE for a database isn't egregious, databases provide huge value, but for that little performance, that's crazy.
I can only assume as core count has blown up over the last 10 years, the pricing has somewhat diminished, but still, I'd be expecting a heck of a lot more capacity for 1 SWE.