sones GraphDB

» see sones.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

sones GraphDB stored data as a graph: objects with direct references to their neighbors, so following a relationship cost a pointer hop and no global index lookup. It was written in C# and ran on the .NET Framework or on Mono. It came with its own query language called GQL, built to look enough like SQL that a working developer could read it on sight. You could reach it over a REST API or through a traversal API that walked outward from a set of nodes.

The company was sones GmbH, founded in 2007 by three graduates of TU Ilmenau, with the development team in Erfurt. The open source Community Edition went out under the AGPL in July 2010, with a paid enterprise edition alongside it, and a hosted version running on Microsoft's Azure platform. Version 2.0 shipped on 11 May 2011. In January 2011 the company moved its headquarters to Leipzig, where the management and the sales side sat.

Money was not the early problem. Two financing rounds, in 2008 and 2010, brought in T-Venture and the Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen as lead investors, and TechCrunch wrote the January 2011 round up as a graph database maker raising millions to expand a cloud business. The capital went into the Erfurt engineering team and into building a marketing department.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tranche ~

What killed it is written plainly in the administrator's own press release, and it is one sentence long: the investors did not pay a tranche from the second financing round. The managing directors went to the Amtsgericht Leipzig and filed for insolvency on the ground of impending illiquidity, which is the German filing you make before you actually run out of money.

The provisional administrator, Dr. Oliver Hartig, kept the business trading while the management went back to the existing investors and looked for new ones. Those conversations produced nothing. As of 1 January 2012 the operation was shut down and the insolvency proceedings were formally opened. On 2 March 2012 Hartig announced that the graph database itself was for sale, with his office phone number as the contact.

~ the moment it was built for ~

2010 was the year every conference had a NoSQL track and the pitch deck slide was always the same: relational databases were built for rows and the web is made of connections. The company had a working product and German corporate money behind it, and it still ran out of road inside eighteen months. Neo4j was selling almost the same idea in the same years and is still being sold now.

None of this reached me, and I would not expect it to have. This was an enterprise product sold in German, written for .NET at a time when the work I was near ran on other stacks, and its whole public footprint was the developer press in one country. The Turkish side of this story is that there is no Turkish side of it.

~ the name, later ~

In 2014 the GraphDB trademark was acquired by Ontotext, a Bulgarian company with a graph database of its own called OWLIM, which it promptly renamed GraphDB. That product is still sold under the name today, which means the word outlived the insolvency while the code underneath it changed hands completely.

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