GraphDB-FA-big-heroIBM today announced the general availability of Graph, a service for the Bluemix cloud offering that the company said helps set up a relatively new, high-performing type of database.

Graph databases differ from traditional SQL databases in that they store both data and the relationships among the data. The relationships among data points are as important as the data points themselves. Unlike SQL databases, which can require complex queries to extract conclusions from data, graph databases execute queries more efficiently, and their advantage over SQL databases increases with the complexity of the query. Graph databases, which have become more popular in the last decade, are often used in apps that make recommendations about music or restaurants.

When Graph was in beta, IBM warned in its documentation that Graph shouldn’t be used for high-volume, high-performance or production applications. Now that it’s in GA — and those limitations are presumably eliminated — IBM is giving customers 500 MB of free data storage and 25,000 free API calls per month.

Amazon Web Services, too, offers graph databases, while Microsoft Azure’s Graph Engine was released as a public preview in May 2015.

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