NetworkXternal

NetworkXternal is NetworkX-like interface for external memory graphs persisted in various databases. This lets you upscale from Megabyte-Gigabyte graphs to Terabyte-Petabyte graphs (that won't fit into RAM), without changing your code. It's not a silver bullet, as it comes with a performance penalty, but it can be a good place to start.

The library was designed to be compatible with the following databases:

• MongoDB - modern (yet mature) distributed document DB,
• Neo4J - disturbingly slow and unstable DBMS positioned as the go-to Graph database,
• SQLite3 - ubiquitous compact relational DBMS with basic SQL support,
• PostgreSQL - most feature-rich open-source relational DB,
• MySQL - the most commonly-used relational DB.

Project Structure

• networkxternal - Graph-like DBMS client wrappers.
• benchmarks - benchmarking tools and performance results.
• assets - toy datasets for testing purposes.

Compared DBs

Some common databases have licenses that prohibit sharing of benchmark results, so they were excluded from comparisons.

Name	Purpose	Implementation	Code Length in /src/**
MongoDB	Documents	C++	3'900'000 lines
Postgres	Tables	C	1'300'000 lines
Neo4J	Graphs	Java	800'000 lines
UStore	Graphs, Table, Text	C++	80'000 lines

MongoDB

• A distributed ACID document store.
• Internally uses the BSON binary format.
• Very popular open-source project backed by the $MDB publicly traded company.
• Provides bindings for most programming languages (including PyMongo for Python).

SQLite3

• Embedded tabular single-file SQL database with an extreme level of adoption.
• Provides a more direct C API in addition to the SQL interface.
• We use SQLAlchemy for Object-Relational-Mapping, which is by far the most common Python ORM tool.
• We overwrite the page size, Write-Ahead-Log format and concurrency settings for higher performance.

Postgres, MySQL & other SQLs

• Most common open-source SQL databases.
• Work well in single-node environment, but scale poorly out of the box.
• Mostly store search indexes in a form of a B-Tree. They generally provide good read performance, but are slow to update.

Neo4J

• The best known graph database with over 10 year of history.
• Instead of SQL provides Cypher DSL for queries, which are transmitted using Bolt protocol.
• Some of the essential indexing capabilities are not available in the free version.
• There are some compatibility issues between API versions 3.5 and 4.
• In our experience, Neo4J is extremely unstable and doesn't scale beyond tiny datasets. Generally crashes due to Java VM heap management issues.

TODO

• Benchmark on small & mid graphs.
• Session management in SQL and Neo4J.
• Duration constraints for benchmarks.
• Testing suite.
• Refactor benchmarks and include MemGraph.
• Mixed multithreaded Read/Write benchmarks in GIL-less Python 3.13.

Building

uv build # To build the project
uv venv  # To create a development environment
uv run ruff check