Mitch Pronschinske 
Sones Extends the Reach of Open Source Graph DBs
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A German data storage company, sones, opened the source code of its graph database this month, effectively ending .NET's lack of access to an open source graph DB. The sones GraphDB also has a REST interface like Neo4j which makes it accessible to many more programming environments. sones is now licensed under the AGPLv3.
Sones is a OO graph data store for semi-structured, distributed data. It is built on the .NET framework and Mono, allowing it to run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix systems. The main focus of the sones DB is not on the data, objects, or vertices of the graph, but rather on their type-safe connections (edges). The sones Wiki clarifies this by saying, "This means we are interested in the name of a user within a large scale social network, but we are much more interested to know which films his friends'-friends watched last summer and thought that they were amazing. In the near future we will provide a large framework of graph algorithms for these problems and usage scenarios."
Sones has both a SOAP and a REST web service interface. It also uses the GraphDB query language (GQL). You can find a cheatsheet here. Neo4j is one of the few other Graph DBs with a RESTful service. Before sones was open sourced, OSS graph DBs were limited to JVM developers or Twitter's FlockDB, which isn't a complete graph DB.
One of the newest features in sones is the GraphDB Visualization tool. It connects to a live database and lets you run queries on it, which are then presented in a intuitive spiderweb/hairball-like graph. You can also manipulate queries and data to see how a graphDB works, looks, and feels.
Here is a video of the sones GraphDB VisualGraph tool in action:
And here it is on Microsoft's Surface:
You can find a tutorial with examples of how to use sones Graph DB here. Take a look at this code comparison between sones and some other graph DBs.
Go pick up the source code for sones GraphDB at GitHub.
Sones is a OO graph data store for semi-structured, distributed data. It is built on the .NET framework and Mono, allowing it to run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix systems. The main focus of the sones DB is not on the data, objects, or vertices of the graph, but rather on their type-safe connections (edges). The sones Wiki clarifies this by saying, "This means we are interested in the name of a user within a large scale social network, but we are much more interested to know which films his friends'-friends watched last summer and thought that they were amazing. In the near future we will provide a large framework of graph algorithms for these problems and usage scenarios."
Sones has both a SOAP and a REST web service interface. It also uses the GraphDB query language (GQL). You can find a cheatsheet here. Neo4j is one of the few other Graph DBs with a RESTful service. Before sones was open sourced, OSS graph DBs were limited to JVM developers or Twitter's FlockDB, which isn't a complete graph DB.
One of the newest features in sones is the GraphDB Visualization tool. It connects to a live database and lets you run queries on it, which are then presented in a intuitive spiderweb/hairball-like graph. You can also manipulate queries and data to see how a graphDB works, looks, and feels.
Here is a video of the sones GraphDB VisualGraph tool in action:
And here it is on Microsoft's Surface:
You can find a tutorial with examples of how to use sones Graph DB here. Take a look at this code comparison between sones and some other graph DBs.
Go pick up the source code for sones GraphDB at GitHub.
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Neo Technology and DataStax are leading the charge for the NoSQL movement. You can learn more about the Neo4j Graph Database in the project discussion forums and try out the new Spring Data Neo4j, which enables POJO-based development. You can also see how Apache Cassandra, a ColumnFamily data store, is pushing the boundaries of persistence with cloud capabilities and deployments at SocialFlow and Netflix.
