Are GraphDBs ever the right move in terms of performance?
But it seems likely that for queries that differentiate graph databases, such as finding long, variable-length paths, that there are cases where they can excel.
I work with large amounts of geographic data. We use Cassandra and RDBMS as the traditional storage but whenever we want to do network analysis it goes into graph DB just to take advantage of the tooling.
And one of our use cases is exactly what you mention. If you are interested in the properties of the edges of long highways in a road network that can stretch hundreds of edges, for instance, RDBMS ain’t gonna cut it.