Native GraphQL Database with graph backend
Dgraph is a horizontally scalable and distributed GraphQL database with a graph backend. It provides
ACID transactions, consistent replication, and linearizable reads. It’s built from the ground up to
perform a rich set of queries. Being a native GraphQL database, it tightly controls how the data is
arranged on disk to optimize for query performance and throughput, reducing disk seeks and network
calls in a cluster.
Dgraph’s goal is to provide Google production-level scale and throughput, with low enough latency to
serve real-time user queries over terabytes of structured data. Dgraph supports
GraphQL query syntax, and responds in
JSON and Protocol Buffers
over GRPC and HTTP. Dgraph is written using the Go Programming Language.
Dgraph is at version v24.1.3 and is production-ready. Apart from the vast open source
community, it is being used in production at multiple Fortune 500 companies, and by
Intuit Katlas and
VMware Purser. A hosted version of Dgraph is available at
https://cloud.dgraph.io.
Dgraph officially supports the Linux/amd64 architecture. Support for Linux/arm64 is in development.
In order to take advantage of memory performance gains and other architecture-specific advancements
in Linux, we dropped official support Mac and Windows in 2021, see
this blog post for more
information. You can still build and use Dgraph on other platforms (for live or bulk loading for
instance), but support for platforms other than Linux/amd64 is not available.
Running Dgraph in a Docker environment is the recommended testing and deployment method.
If you’re using Docker, you can use the
official Dgraph image.
docker pull dgraph/dgraph:latest
For more information on a variety Docker deployment methods including Docker Compose and Kubernetes,
see the docs.
docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -p 9080:9080 -v ~/dgraph:/dgraph dgraph/standalone:latest
If you want to install from source, install Go 1.19+ or later and the following dependencies:
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install build-essential
Then clone the Dgraph repository and use make install to install the Dgraph binary in the
directory named by the GOBIN environment variable, which defaults to $GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin if
the GOPATH environment variable is not set.
git clone https://github.com/hypermodeinc/dgraph.gitcd dgraphmake install
To get started with Dgraph, follow:
If the answers to the above are YES, then Dgraph would be a great fit for your application. Dgraph
provides NoSQL like scalability while providing SQL like transactions and the ability to select,
filter, and aggregate data points. It combines that with distributed joins, traversals, and graph
operations, which makes it easy to build applications with it.
| Features | Dgraph | Neo4j | Janus Graph |
|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Sharded and Distributed | Single server (+ replicas in enterprise) | Layer on top of other distributed DBs |
| Replication | Consistent | None in community edition (only available in enterprise) | Via underlying DB |
| Data movement for shard rebalancing | Automatic | Not applicable (all data lies on each server) | Via underlying DB |
| Language | GraphQL inspired | Cypher | Gremlin |
| Protocols | Grpc / HTTP + JSON / RDF | Bolt + Cypher | Websocket / HTTP |
| Transactions | Distributed ACID transactions | Single server ACID transactions | Not typically ACID |
| Full-Text Search | Native support | Native support | Via External Indexing System |
| Regular Expressions | Native support | Native support | Via External Indexing System |
| Geo Search | Native support | External support only | Via External Indexing System |
| License | Apache 2.0 | GPL v3 | Apache 2.0 |
Please see
Contributing to Dgraph for
guidelines on contributions.
The Dgraph team maintains several
officially supported client libraries. There are also libraries
contributed by the community
unofficial client libraries.
