EP 8 — PuppyGraph’s Weimo Liu on Unlocking Graph Database Value Without Data Migration

Ever wondered why graph databases promise so much but often fail to reach production? In this episode of The Data Fabric Show, Kaycee talks with Weimo Liu, CEO of PuppyGraph, about creating the "Trino of graph databases." 

 

Drawing from his experience at a previous graph startup and Google's F1 team, Weimo describes how PuppyGraph enables organizations to visualize complex relationships like money laundering patterns or supply chain dependencies without moving data from existing platforms like Snowflake, Oracle, or Databricks. 

 

By treating data logically as a graph while physically remaining as tables, PuppyGraph has broken through the adoption barrier that has plagued graph database implementations for years.

 

Topics discussed:

 

• How PuppyGraph enables organizations to leverage graph capabilities without moving data from existing sources like Oracle, Snowflake, or Databricks.
• The critical insight that, despite strong interest and clear use cases, many graph database projects fail to reach production due to ETL complexity and data migration costs.
• Why financial fraud detection benefits from graph visualization when tracing money through multiple fake accounts, offering clear relationship mapping that SQL queries can't match.
• The strategic decision to partner rather than compete with established graph database vendors like Neo4J by developing complementary technology that expands the overall market.
• How graph relationships provide enhanced semantic context for large language models compared to raw SQL tables, improving AI understanding of complex data relationships.
• The development of multi-stage analytics pipelines where SQL processes initial data, graph visualizes relationships, and results feedback to data lakes for machine learning.
• Why modern data lake architectures enable organizations to solve complex problems using specialized tools for each phase, eliminating the vendor lock-in that previously made integrated workflows prohibitively expensive.

Check out Puppygraph on LinkedIn, YouTube and on X!