Efficient storage is the product
· 6 min read
When people talk about graph databases, they usually talk about query languages, visualizations, and relationship modeling. All of that matters. But for the kind of database I wanted, the deeper product question was storage.
If the database is in memory, storage efficiency is not an implementation detail. It is the product boundary.
Every extra allocation is less graph. Every unnecessary clone is less fan-out. Every vague data structure is a future performance mystery. A graph database can have a beautiful query language and still feel wrong if the storage layer wastes the machine.