What do you like best about Arango?
ArangoDB offers a performant graph data model that offers some key benefits for almost any kind of data structure—not just graph theory applications. ArangoDB and its graph implementation allows you to think about entities semantically, and as standalone objects. Because edges in the graph are distinct from vertices, you can reason about data in isolation from how you or other teams want to create entity relationships.
IME this is a significantly streamlined approach to development, rather than complex ERD diagrams, foreign key constraints, foreign keys added to all tables, etc. that you'd normally use in an RDBMS/SQL setup. There is significant freedom in avoiding the RDBMS model and shoe-horning different data models beneath the same old SQL syntax.
ArangoDB also is trivial to start up via Docker, has a build-in UI that offers all of the fundamentals, and most of what you'd want outside of more hardcore analysis or data UIs. Implementing any size of cloud instance is trivial, and their datacenter locality is now quite good.
ArangoDB uses a performant K/V store based on RocksDB under the covers, including inverted index search out of the box, transactions, dynamic sharding. ArangoDB covers any database need I've had working with B2B/C SaaS products and services, all with a clean built-in interface and easier/possible to scale unlike many problematic document stores that are now rebranding as vector stores rather than (IMHO) getting their fundamentals fixed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Arango?
I really don't have dislikes, but there are a couple of things that they could add in the future to improve:
* When introduced in 2020ish, their cloud service (then called Oasis) had some issues with memory usage and silent lockups of Coordinators. That has since been resolved and they're adding more and more observability and resilience every year.
* They're working on a new replication system, which hopefully can be used as a powerful source for event streaming for auditing, ETL, or other purposes.
Other notes:
* I'm not convinced that ArangoDB should add vector store capability (I'd want a separate instance to separate the load profile anyway). It may help from a marketing perspective with the current state of the ebb and flow of AI buzz, but I'd rather it not come at the cost of existing core functionality.
* While the API offers K/V functionality, performing queries or graph traversals requires writing AQL queries. AQL is very powerful, but there's a learning curve, especially if you're used to SQL. As a SQList, you might at first think that "FOR vertex IN collection; FILTER vertex.valid == true;" is going to perform a table scan and filter, for example. But spending the time will reveal some very powerful functionality not possible with SQL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.