I am sure you have seen the Neo4j graphic:
in almost every Neo4j presentation.
Seeing the graphic dozens, if not hundreds of times, made me realize it has two fundamental flaws.
First, if the dotted line represents 90% on the size axis, the scale of the size axis must change at the 90% mark or thereabouts.
Otherwise, key/value stores are at 180% of size. A marketing point for them but an unlikely one for anyone to credit.
Second, the complexity axis has no scale at all. Or at least not one that I can discern.
If you take a standard document database, say a CMS system, why is it more complex than a key/value store?
Or a bigtable clone for that matter?
Don’t get me wrong, I still think the future of data processing lies with graph databases.
Or more accurately, with the explicit identification/representation of relationships.
But I don’t need misleading graphics to make that case.