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Free Lesson
You Don't Need a Graph DB
45 min
Sep 30, 2025 2:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
When graph databases actually make sense
Understand the use cases where dedicated graph DBs provide real value versus when they're unnecessary complexity.
Implement graph structures in general-purpose databases
Learn how to represent (node, edge, node) relationships using PostgreSQL, MySQL, or your existing db infra.
The real bottleneck: graph modeling, not performance
Discover why defining nodes and edges is the hard part, not traversal speed, and how to approach knowledge graph design
Alternatives that might serve you better
Explore how search engines, document stores, and SQL databases can handle many graph workloads without specialized tools
Why this topic matters
Many teams adopt graph databases believing they need specialized tools for relationship data, adding unnecessary complexity to their stack. This session reveals that for most use cases, the performance benefits don't justify the overhead. You'll learn to evaluate whether you truly need graph DB capabilities and how to implement graph patterns using simpler alternatives.
You'll learn from
Jo Kristian Bergum
Search & Retrieval Expert, CEO of Hornet.dev
Hamel Husain
ML Engineer with 20 years of experience