NebulaGraph in 2019: It’s Worth the Effort

It's that time of a year when everyone is checking if their New Year Resolutions for 2019 have been met.

So do we.

In 2019, we have done a lot. And there's also a lot that needs to be done down the road.

Looking back, we are thrilled that NebulaGraph has been shipped to so many graph enthusiatists and pinoneer companies who are always seeking for cutting edge technologies for better business outcomes.

And it is worth the while.

Why bother?

It's the birth year for NebulaGraph. Before its official birthday, there has been a long discussion of what NebulaGraph would be like and how it would be serving people in need. And even, why bother creating such a product?

In this age, it's at everyone's finger tips to get information. Data is exploding.

So does data not matter any more?

No, it still matters, but only to those who are able to get insight out of it.

But how?

You get it. The graph technology is one of the best ways to achieve that, for connected data in particular. As graph veterans, we all know that.

We know as well that existing graph database solutions are not good enough to meet the ever-increasing demand for both OLTP and OLAP scenarios.

Vision & Mission

Big data has been the truth of the modern age. More and more data is generated, in an interconnected manner.

And we believe that business values lie in the interconnected data. The more you are able to dig out of it, the better your business will grow.

So the vision of NebulaGraph is to enable the interconnected world, with best-of-the-art graph technology.

Our CEO, Sherman Ye, is ambitious to help businesses unleash the power of connected data. And this is the mission of NebulaGraph, shared by the team.

There's a long way ahead of us but we'll stick to it.

Open Source vs Closed Source

They say that open source is the new norm in the database industry. And there's a reason for that.

At NebulaGraph, this is a quick decision because we believe in the power of community. With the support of a strong and active community, open source is the best path to our vision to bring distributed graph database technology to every corner of the world.

Distributed Cluster vs Single Node

Distributed graph processing is hard. Truth. There's simply way much more to consider from the technical perspective for a distributed cluster than a single node. Partitioning rule, data consistancy, query performance and ACID compliance, just to name a few.

Tough choice, right?

Honestly, no, it's quite an easy decision to make because distributed system is THE solution for the future as linear scalability matters.

And we believe the team is up to the challenge.

What's achieved?

It takes time and efforts to develop a truly distributed graph database solution.

Product Milestone

In May, the Alpha version of NebulaGraph was ready to meet the public on GitHub.

Three months later, in August, the Beta version was ready, with these higghlights added:

Quick compiling
Easy-to-deploy Neula Graph Cluster
Learner role being added to the RAFT protocol

Another three months later, in November:

RC 1 - Data import via csv file
RC 2 - Clients in Java, Python, and Go

We are getting closer to the official 1.0 version.

Feedback from the Community

We have been getting a lot of positive feeback from the community. And we are right on the power of community.

The community has been waiting for an open source distributed graph database. As the well known technology blog 36Kr wrote after interviewing Sherman Ye, NebulaGraph is working to make a truly distributed graph database available and affordable. NebulaGraph was also invited to top tech summits QCon and COSCon and gave a keynote speech titled "Thoughts and Practice on Large Scale Distributed Graph Database".

Here are the numbers in NebulaGraph in 2019:

Be the GitHub Trending project two times
Has got 1,614 stars, 269 forks, and 760 commits on GitHub (as of Dec. 18, 2019)
20+ PoC clients at pilot stage implementing NebulaGraph
40+ articles on forums to share our insight on Neula Graph and the graph technology at large
80,000+ readers talked to us about graph databases
200+ enthusiasits started their journey with NebulaGraph by watching our video tutorials on Bilibili and YouTube since November
100+ enthusiasists attended our nMeetup events since July

What's in 2020 and beyond?

People are using NebulaGraph and keep providing their feedbacks on what features they want NebulaGraph to have. And we are lucky to have them so that NebulaGraph can be the solution people really need.

Based on the feedback from the community, together with our own understanding of the graph database industry, we will march steadily towards our vision to enable an interconnected world.

For goals in 2020, we have the following in mind:

Make NebulaGraph best-of-the-art graph database solution
- Query engine - Optimizer, Match algorithm, OpenCypher interface
- Storage engine - Index, transaction, OLAP
- Graph visualization
- SaaS
A better community to spread the graph technologies
- Online sharing
- Offline meetup

Wish you all a happy new year!