I prefer graph databases for a number of reasons but the rhetoric about them has gotten completely out of hand.
The most recent Internet rumor is that graph database had a 250% spike in popularity.
Really?
Care to guess how that “measurement” was taken? It was more intellectually honest than Office of Management and Budget‘s sequestration numbers, but only just.
Here are the parameters for the 250% increase:
- Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google and Bing for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for “
database”, e.g. “Oracle database”. - General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.
- Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.
- Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.
- Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional network LinkedIn.
We calculate the popularity value of a system by standardizing and averaging of the individual parameters. These mathematical transformations are made in a way so that the distance of the individual systems is preserved. That means, when system A has twice as large a value in the DB-Engines Ranking as system B, then it is twice as popular when averaged over the individual evaluation criteria.
The DB-Engines Ranking does not measure the number of installations of the systems, or their use within IT systems. It can be expected, that an increase of the popularity of a system as measured by the DB-Engines Ranking (e.g. in discussions or job offers) precedes a corresponding broad use of the system by a certain time factor. Because of this, the DB-Engines Ranking can act as an early indicator. (emphasis added) (Source: DB-Engines)
So, this 250% increase in popularity is like a high school cheerleader election. Yes?
Oracle, may have signed several nation level contracts in the past year but are outdistanced in the rankings by twitter traffic?
Not what I would call reliable intelligence.
PS: the rumor apparently originates with: Tables turning? Graph databases see 250% spike in popularity by Lucy Carey.
Personally I can’t see how Lucy got 250% out of the reported numbers. There is a story about repeating something so often that it is believed. Do you remember it?