Graph global operations

As we discussed earlier, graph theory has done a lot of fascinating work on the analysis and understanding of graphs in their entirety. Finding clusters of nodes, discovering unknown patterns of relationships between nodes, and defining centrality and/or in-betweenness of specific graph components are extremely interesting and wonderful concepts, but they are very different concepts from the ones that graph databases excel at. These concepts are looking at the graph in its entirety and we refer to them as graph global operations. While graph databases are extremely powerful at answering graph local questions, there is an entire category of graph tools (often referred to as graph processing engines or graph compute engines) that look at the graph global problems.

Many of these tools serve an extremely specific purpose and even use specific hardware and software (usually using lots of memory and CPU horsepower) to achieve their tasks, and they are typically part of a very different side of the IT architecture. Graph processing is typically done in batches, in the background, over the course of several hours/days/weeks and would not typically be well placed between a web request and web response. It's a very different kind of ball game.