Imagine your database of choice blown out of the water by a startup emerging from stealth. TigerGraph may have done just that for graph databases.

Graph is a data model that has long lingered on the fringe of mainstream adoption. But that is changing, as graph lends itself well to representing many real world problems, and the technology is evolving.

When you see IBM and Oracle moving in this space, trying to beef up their offerings, publishing reports and mentioning how they use graph for cases such as anti-fraud, you know there’s something going on.

It’s not the IBMs and Oracles of the world that are leading in this space however. The leaders in terms of market share are Neo4j and Titan, the latter recently acquired by DataStax and is now the basis of DataStax Enterprise Graph.

Either way, none of those were able to deal with graph data at Twitter scale when Yu Xu needed that. Social graphs are a prime example of utilizing the graph model, Xu was working at Twitter till 2011, and the graph databases that were around at the time could not cope.

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