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This is a great topic. I have been working on TAO for many years. I am not very familiar with other graph databases; I assume fundamentally they are more or less the same. Here are some differences between RDB and a graph db IMHO, 1. sharding and transaction boundary 2. Secondary index support 3. How “join” works (eg. give me a list of my friends who follows Justin Bieber)

You’re right that graph db is very easy to use a lot of the times.

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TAO uses MySQL doesn't it? Would that make it more of a service built on top of MySQL, rather than a unique graph database?

It does, which one can argue it’s an implementation detail. The differences I mentioned above eg sharding, transaction boundary, secondary indices, etc. should be generally applicable to a non-relational db and not unique to TAO. I could be wrong though; as I know little about other graph dbs.

It would probably be more productive to compare RDB and Graph with certain workload examples (OLTP, OLAP, joins, scans, etc.).

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