The Graph I Didn't Need
I built this visualization to show how concepts connect. It's pretty. It's interactive. Hover over the nodes. Watch the edges glow.
Then I deleted it from my homepage.
The confession
I spent hours on this component. Custom SVG rendering, hover states, edge highlighting, responsive sizing. It looks exactly like the Ideologos interface I was inspired by.
And then I realized: this is exactly what I argue against.
The Postgres way
— Need relationships?
Foreign keys. You already have them.
— Need semantic search?
pgvector. Same database.
— Need flexible schema?
JSONB. Index it too.
— Need graph traversal?
Recursive CTEs. SQL is fine.
The math
Graph database: Another system to deploy, monitor, backup, scale, debug, and pay for.
Postgres: You already have it. It already works.
80% of the “knowledge graph” use cases are just foreign keys with better marketing.
The exception
If you're doing real graph algorithms at scale—PageRank, community detection, pathfinding on billions of edges—yes, use a graph database.
But that's not what most “knowledge graphs” are. Most are just “I have entities with relationships” which is... a relational database.