> It's the first time I hear about graph-relational DBs.
This is unsurprising, because we just invented the term :-)
> Is a graph-relational database something completely disjointed from a graph database?
Graph-relational is still relational, i.e. it's a relational model with extensions that make modeling and querying graph-like data easier. And in apps everything is graph-like (hence GraphQL etc). An important point is that graph-relational, like relational is storage-agnostic, i.e. it makes no assumptions on how data is actually arranged on disk.
Pure graph databases, on the other hand, encode the assumption that data is actually _physically_ organized as a graph into their model and query languages.
I guess the word "graph" is simply too overloaded in computing.
There’s at least one German-Bulgarian company called Plan-Vision that implemented such graph-relational approach like 15 years ago. their VSQL is similarly working on the E/R conceptual level and gets translated (or compiled into) to the underlying Postgresql or Oracle. You also get a neat EcmaScript like language that works with the collections in a graph like manner.
Long before Arango, Orient etc.
The company is absolutely nowhere near to you guys in terms of marketing, but their thing works with more than 40 enterprise clients so far.
So you definitely did not ‘just’ invent the concept. A lot of companies approach the problem one way or another…
>Pure graph databases, on the other hand, encode the assumption that data is actually _physically_ organized as a graph into their model and query languages.
What would be the benefit / disadvantage in each case?
This is unsurprising, because we just invented the term :-)
> Is a graph-relational database something completely disjointed from a graph database?
Graph-relational is still relational, i.e. it's a relational model with extensions that make modeling and querying graph-like data easier. And in apps everything is graph-like (hence GraphQL etc). An important point is that graph-relational, like relational is storage-agnostic, i.e. it makes no assumptions on how data is actually arranged on disk.
Pure graph databases, on the other hand, encode the assumption that data is actually _physically_ organized as a graph into their model and query languages.
I guess the word "graph" is simply too overloaded in computing.