FlockDB - What is it? And best cases for it uses

Just came across FlockDB graph database. Details at github /flockDB. Twitter claims it uses FlockDB for the following:

Twitter runs FlockDB on a large cluster of machines. we use it to store soci开发者_Python百科al graphs (who follows whom, who blocks whom) and secondary indices at twitter.

At first glance, setup and trying it doesn't look straight forward. Have anyone already used it / setup this? If so, please answer the following general queries.

• What kind of applications is it better suited for? (Twitter claims it is simple and very rough, it remains to see what it meant though)
• How is FlockDB better than other graph db / noSQL db. Have you setup FlockDB, used it for a application?
• Early advices any?

Note: I am evaluating the FlockDB and other graph databases mainly for learning them. Perhaps, I will build an application for that.

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Flockdb is still Yet to be released by Twitter, which means the current version you are seeing won't run properly. Going by the history of commits i guess within a couple of days you can see a stable version which you can build and test.

Compared to something like Neo4J you can say Flockdb is not even a graph database. The toughest part of a graph database is how many levels of depth it can handle. From the little documentation of Flockdb it seems like it can't handle more than 1 level of depth. Where FlockDb wins compared to DBs like Neo4J is it's low latency, high throughput and inherent distributed nature.

Regarding Applications - i guess it will be a great fit whenever you need social networking or twitter like behavior. I don't think many will find such use cases though (who gets 20k friend requests per sec ?).

I Just started looking into Flockdb. Right now i am planning to use it in my forum software. Instead of user1 follows user2 relationship, i am planning to use it for user1 read post1, user1 favorites post1 etc. Being one of the highly active online communities we get a lot of such traffic(read/favorite). Can't think of any other use cases now.

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Don't miss OrientDB. It's a document-graph dbms with special operator for traversing relationships: http://code.google.com/p/orient/wiki/GraphDatabase