dgraph – dgraph-io


Dgraph is a horizontally scalable and distributed GraphQL database with a graph backend. It provides
ACID transactions, consistent replication, and linearizable reads. It's built from the ground up to
perform a rich set of queries. Being a native GraphQL database, it tightly controls how the data is
arranged on disk to optimize for query performance and throughput, reducing disk seeks and network
calls in a cluster.

Dgraph's goal is to provide Google production-level scale and throughput, with low enough latency to
serve real-time user queries over terabytes of structured data. Dgraph supports
GraphQL query syntax, and responds in JSON
and Protocol Buffers over
GRPC and HTTP. Dgraph is written using the Go Programming Language.

Status

Dgraph is at [version v25][rel] and is production-ready. Apart from the vast open source community,
it is being used in production at multiple Fortune 500 companies.

[rel]: https://github.com/dgraph-io/dgraph/releases/tag/v25.0.0

Supported Platforms

Dgraph officially supports the Linux/amd64 and Linux/arm64 architectures. In order to take advantage
of memory performance gains and other architecture-specific advancements in Linux, we dropped
official support for Mac and Windows in 2021, see
this blog post for more
information. You can still build and use Dgraph on other platforms (for live or bulk loading for
instance), but support for platforms other than Linux/amd64 and Linux/arm64 is not available.

Running Dgraph in a Docker environment is the recommended testing and deployment method.

Install with Docker

If you're using Docker, you can use the
official Dgraph image.

docker pull dgraph/dgraph:latest

For more information on a variety Docker deployment methods including Docker Compose and Kubernetes,
see the docs.

Run a Quick Standalone Cluster

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -p 9080:9080 -v ~/dgraph:/dgraph dgraph/standalone:latest

Install from Source

If you want to install from source, install Go 1.24+ or later and the following dependencies:

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Build and Install

Then clone the Dgraph repository and use make install to install the Dgraph binary in the
directory named by the GOBIN environment variable, which defaults to $GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin if
the GOPATH environment variable is not set.

git clone https://github.com/dgraph-io/dgraph.git
cd dgraph
make setup
make install

Get Started

To get started with Dgraph, follow:

• Installation to queries in 4 quick steps.
• Tutorial and presentation videos on

YouTube channel.

Is Dgraph the right choice for me?

• Do you have more than 10 SQL tables connected via foreign keys?
• Do you have sparse data, which doesn't elegantly fit into SQL tables?
• Do you want a simple and flexible schema, which is readable and maintainable over time?
• Do you care about speed and performance at scale?

If the answers to the above are YES, then Dgraph would be a great fit for your application. Dgraph
provides NoSQL like scalability while providing SQL like transactions and the ability to select,
filter, and aggregate data points. It combines that with distributed joins, traversals, and graph
operations, which makes it easy to build applications with it.

Dgraph compared to other graph DBs

| Features | Dgraph | Neo4j | Janus Graph |
| ----------------------------------- | ----------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------- |
| Architecture | Sharded and Distributed | Single server (+ replicas in enterprise) | Layer on top of other distributed DBs |
| Replication | Consistent | None in community edition (only available in enterprise) | Via underlying DB |
| Data movement for shard rebalancing | Automatic | Not applicable (all data lies on each server) | Via underlying DB |
| Language | GraphQL inspired | Cypher | Gremlin |
| Protocols | Grpc / HTTP + JSON / RDF | Bolt + Cypher | Websocket / HTTP |
| Transactions | Distributed ACID transactions | Single server ACID transactions | Not typically ACID |
| Full-Text Search | Native support | Native support | Via External Indexing System |
| Regular Expressions | Native support | Native support | Via External Indexing System |
| Geo Search | Native support | External support only | Via External Indexing System |
| License | Apache 2.0 | GPL v3 | Apache 2.0 |

Users

• Dgraph official documentation is present at docs.dgraph.io.
• For general information and questions, visit

Github discussions.

• Please see releases tab to find the latest release

and corresponding release notes.

Developers

Please see Contributing to Dgraph
for guidelines on contributions.

Client Libraries

The Dgraph team maintains several
officially supported client libraries. There are also libraries
contributed by the community
unofficial client libraries.

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Contact

• Please use Github discussions for questions,

feature requests and discussions.

• Please use GitHub Issues for filing bugs or feature

requests.