TigerGraph Inc. is bringing its graph database to the cloud in announcement being made today at Amazon Web Services Inc.’s re:Invent conference.

The company, which launched a little over a year ago with $31 million in funding, claims to have the world’s fastest graph analytics platform. Graph databases are a type of NoSQL database that represent data as connected objects rather than in rows and columns.

Connections can be traversed quickly to find relationships that would be difficult or impossible to identify using conventional relational tables. TigerGraph claims to support queries involving trillions of relationships and to traverse more than 100 million edges per second. An edge is one of the distinctive ways in which graph databases represent and store data.

TigerGraph had previously been available as an application in cloud marketplaces, but this is the first native cloud implementation. The company is trying to ease the on-boarding process by providing starter kits “where you can load your data and use sample data and queries from our library to get value more quickly,” said Todd Blaschka, the company’s chief operating officer.

The native cloud version eliminates the need to set up, configure or manage servers, schedule backups or monitoring or look for security vulnerabilities, the company said. The starter kits cover uses such as antifraud, antimoney-laundering and customer profiling. They include graph schemas, sample data, pre-loaded queries and a library of customizable graph algorithms for common tasks like PageRank, shortest path and community detection.

Graph databases have been a hot commodity over the past couple of years, with some significant funding rounds, acquisitions and product launches. Both Amazon and Microsoft Corp. have graph engines in the cloud, but “they’re designed for different use cases,” Blaschka said.

“We focus on large data sets that require deeper analytics for [online analytical processing] and real-time operations,” he said “Their offerings are designed more for visualization and exploration of your data.”

Charges are billed monthly based upon actual use. The software will initially be available on the AWS cloud, with others to follow.

Image: TigerGraph