is postgres as quick as neo4j, in your use case? ive really been into neo4j lately, but im curious if postgres could also be used as a graph database.
I really liked the cypher query language of neo4j, it was super easy to learn and is way simpler to express complex traversals across a graph. Writing a query in postgres to traverse a graph isn't as straightforward, and unless you're doing it often will take a long time to get used to.
how large was your friends table? maybe it was quick when doing friends of friends because the friends table was already wholly loaded into memory?
i wonder if your relationship traversals spanned across different tables, if postgres would still be as quick?