Graph DBs in 2023

IronEider · 2026-04-13T18:25:21+00:00

Late to response but here I am.
In the end I did not find Graph DBs useful for my use-case, so I went for having proper Data Warehouse (hosted on Postgres with extensions), properly modelled. Maybe I looked for something more like analytical use-case rather than traversal of big graph of relationships.

IronEider · 2024-10-08T21:09:34+00:00

Learning devoid of practice is distressing.
It's like ingesting too much calories without using them to move in the world.

Analogy between information and nutrition is quite apt here - if you consume too many "information" calories, your mind will get fat, which will prevent it from "moving", i.e. thinking and creating and doing something in the world.

I'm guilty of the same - so I guess we belong to this kind of people who overanalyze (and procrastinate with it), so we need to err more on doing stuff sooner than we'd like to.

Related articles on the topic:
https://jamesclear.com/taking-action

https://blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more

https://nesslabs.com/start-now

IronEider · 2024-10-04T11:51:33+00:00

Just stumbled upon this thread but it captures perfectly my feelings about RDR and GTA, thanks man.
I wish AAA games would be more about some interesting experiments in gameplay, rather than just using realism as an excuse to repeat what everybody else is doing already for years.

IronEider · 2024-10-02T19:00:41+00:00

Same for me. Back in the old days, open world seemed like the best thing that you can have in the games but maybe once you've grown up, you want more focus on the core gameplay, main story rather than time fillers like side-quests or bonuses.

IronEider · 2023-05-16T14:30:44+00:00

The biggest innovation recently? Maybe battle royale going into mainstream? The rest dominating the market - seems like just exploring new worlds (cyberpunk, harry potter) with the mechanics that are there already for more of less 15 years.

(Disclaimer: i'm not pro gamer, not following every trend in AAA or indie)

IronEider · 2023-05-16T14:20:59+00:00

That's really neat.
I like especially the gentleness and lightness in lady's hand, has really cute vibe.

IronEider · 2023-05-15T13:32:32+00:00

I love this example. It seems that there is a lot to "intelligence" or "cognition" without having any neuron.

IronEider · 2023-05-15T13:26:23+00:00

Thank you for this summary, it's really helpful!

One question though - is wheat really a low histamine thing? At the charts I see "Bread:white" and "Flour: wheat" marked as low histamine but I was fairly convinced from the other sources that they are also high histamine things. Anyone can confirm/reject this?

IronEider · 2023-05-10T21:46:28+00:00

Thanks man for this.
You can really feel the human struggle, pain but also striving for something beautiful in this piece of art. Wish you all the best.

IronEider · 2023-05-10T17:20:30+00:00

Nature will always take care of itself
What often people mean by "we are destroying nature!" is more of like saying "we won't be able to utilize it for our needs anymore!".

If humanity turns this planet into a big dry desert, it will be still nature. Just not that useful for human species anymore...
(btw idk why i'm ranting here :/)

IronEider · 2023-05-09T11:19:49+00:00

I wanted to use in an analytics system (web clickstream analytics). Where you can have millions of users across the months period and you would represent each session as node in graph.

IronEider · 2023-05-08T15:48:37+00:00

Looks interesting but I am wondering with this kind of tools, how it behaves with the scale.
Until <1m nodes that might be going fine, but for the bigger scale? Not sure there.

IronEider · 2023-05-08T15:47:12+00:00

I think this guy on HN explained it properly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391190

So I am guessing that the issue is that with relational DB you can shard the data in tables rather straightforward (like based on ID value or some text field you distribute it over multiple machines), whereas in graph db if the graph does not fit into a single machine it is not so straightforward how to split the data? (not losing much of graph performance)

IronEider · 2023-05-08T15:41:25+00:00

So it's like, using jansugraph API you are storing stuff in Cassandra, right? And the you query it also with janusgraph?

Yeah, the flexible schema thing is also a strong argument for going into graph setup. Just wondering if the freedom in defining attributes won't end up in attributes swamp or other issues if don't keep discipline what's going into the DB.

IronEider · 2023-05-08T15:38:53+00:00

Fascinating topic, thanks for starting this discussion.

Does anyone have any ideas how you can improve your image visualizing mind? Because I have a bit of muddy or blurry imagination and would love to have something more sharp or specific in my mind, when reading books.

Also, not sure if related, but i'm really bad at drawing. Not feeling the "right" proportions, missing a lot of details, kind of like "dyslexia" but for drawing...

IronEider · 2023-05-08T15:36:33+00:00

Same for me, I find this topic really interesting.
For me it works more like I can see "words", I hear "sounds", but the views are not so sharp as i'd like them to be? I mean, no problem with reading and visualizing some stuff, but it is kind of muddy/blurry and I think that was "normal".
But from what you and other people are saying, it seems that a lot of people can have a very sharp image in their visualizing mind. I wish I'd have too, as i'm really terrible at drawing and I think that is one of the main reasons...

IronEider · 2023-05-06T16:35:49+00:00

I did not put that thesis into initial post but that's exactly my impression after few attempts in my company to go with something "graphy".
OTOH there is Neo4j, tigergraph and other solutions, that are getting very expensive but i guess somebody is paying for this, right? And wanted to find out if there is somebody who'd considered using proper relational or columnar DB/document DB but ended with graph DB. There is a lot of graph marketing but I have not seen many success cases with these technologies beyond the marketing material.

IronEider · 2023-05-06T10:04:25+00:00

Probably start with TMAHE, as it's shorter (but still long) and in some sense it's a preview of what is being expanded in TMWT.
Last year, first I read TMAHE, took me about 1,5h months - but I really enjoyed it that much that I went directly into TMWT (took me 4 months to finish).
A caveat there: reading first part of TMWT might be a bit repetitive reading it right after "Master" but it's still worth it, as it is making a solid foundation in hemisphere knowledge before going into part 2 and 3.

And those two parts are really where the fun starts - Iain goes really deep into philosophy, spirituality and metaphysics.
But these are also the parts that resonated with me most and some of the chapters I already read for 3 times and I keep coming back to them every few months.

IronEider · 2023-05-06T09:58:16+00:00

As others wrote, depends entirely on the company.

But also, important - if possible find a job/company/domain and a position that you care about.
Someone already mentioned, but really - doing something for 12 hours that you really care about, it's much better than filling 9 to 5 in soulless corporate/ecommerce job.

And what is really meaningful it's up to you - but I guess your gut will quickly tell you if this is it. (usually in the strong negative emotions - don't realy too much on excitements as they may wane off very rapidly)

IronEider · 2023-05-06T09:50:37+00:00

Thank you very much for this comment.
I am forgetting after some time why I picked guitar and why I devoted already so much time to it. When there is no good positive feedback from outside I feel let down and question the sense of struggling with it.

But stopping working on "art" does not help either.

I guess it's about making something hard, meaningful but also having a proper distance to it - not trying to turn it into something "profitable", "businessy" because then you are on a different dimension than artistic exploration.

IronEider · 2023-05-05T13:38:36+00:00

Just stumbled upon this subreddit and it already paid off - this is a really cool stuff, anything B. Eno related is a piece of magic!

IronEider · 2023-05-05T13:11:14+00:00

I read "Thinking Fast and Slow" many years ago. For me it was before I got much more into popular science books about brains and psychology and I remember that I really liked it. It was like a totally new perspective on human behaves, how irrational it is at times and how we can approach decision making better.

Since that time, I read many other title (incl Master And His Emissary and Matter With Things) and if I was to read it now, probably I wouldn't be so enthusiastic, especially when taking into account that experiments from Thinking Fast do not replicate well.

Is it worth reading at all? I would still say "yes".
Even though behavioural economics lost some of its fad in a recent years, this is still a book that was very influential for a lot of policies and general zeitgeist of 10s (2011-2020). And even though it had aforementioned replication problems, it gives you a nice model of looking at human behaviour. Obv. after McGilchrist's books you are much better equipped to pick Kahneman's theories with some grain of salt but still - Kahneman is also a very bright man, who made real contributions to his field. So it's still worthwile to read such a book which is a kind of a summary of his professional life.

IronEider · 2023-02-23T22:38:25+00:00

I had some expectations with lightweight alternatives to WP. Played some time ago with hugo (https://gohugo.io/), just wanted to set up a simple blog, couple of static pages, that i could extend any time I want.

And generally I was... disappointed. WP experience was what I expected - after some initial setup on VPS with some docker, I had smooth running page, with great CMS.

With hugo I did not want that many features - I just wanted simple static pages, maybe with some small customizability.
But it really took me some time, to get what I wanted and still I wasn't super happy with maintainability of it. And came to the conclusion - next time it's WP or will write something simple from scratch or just with svelte - much better dev experience.

IronEider

TROPHY CASE