There’s a new article up on Think Vitamin titled, “Should You Go Beyond Relational Databases” discussing the emergence of a crop of non-relational databases.  It’s one of the better introductions that I’ve seen to the landscape of document-oriented databases, graph databases and key-value stores that I’ve run across.  There’s a brief mention of Directed Edge in the graph database section:

There is less choice in graph databases than there is in document databases: Neo4j, AllegroGraphand Sesame (which typically uses MySQL or PostgreSQL as storage back-end) are ones to look at.  FreeBase and DirectedEdge have developed graph databases for their internal use.

Graph databases are often associated with the semantic web and RDF datastores, which is one of the applications they are used for. I actually believe that many other applications’ data would also be well represented in graphs. However, as before, don’t try to force data into a graph if it fits better in tables or documents.

Our own database is quirky hybrid of a graph-database, key-value store and column oriented database — the graph is a collection of interconnected items, which can have arbitrary meta-data associated with them, with column-oriented physical organization.  In fact, rolled into the next batch of updates that we’re testing at the moment are some more groovy features for enhanced item meta data like images and stuff.  We hope to go live real soon with that and The Other Cool New Features.

By popular demand we’ve been banging out some PHP bindings that mirror the Ruby bindings that appeared along with our last web services update and the new developer site.

The API is basically the same adjusted for PHP conventions. They’re still a work in progress and subject to change, but we’d love feedback from folks more steeped in the world of PHP than us.

So, up on ye olde Github, our PHP bindings!