Interesting. I see three reasons right off the bat for this acquisition.
1: Because of the nature of Graph Databases, which are based on Graph Theory and as such are inherently relationship oriented even more so than SQL based “Relational Database Management Systems (RMDBS), they are really good at teasing out relations between stored objects in both structure and particularly unstructured data.
Think how Amazon or Walmart.com keeps track of all your searches and purchases, not only for the immediate management of your personal queries and purchases on their sites but also from those interactions over time they can begin to see the relationships of your queries and purchases by time, location, date, purchase amount and amount that is purchased….etc…in order to determine how, what and why you are purchasing the things you do.
In other words they are building a psychological and predictive profile on you in order to better suit your needs AND to proactively position and push potential items to you that are related to your already existent purchase profile.
So…Apple could have bought Kuzu to embed in their already huge Apple Store, Apple Pay and Apple Services databases and frameworks to become more like Amazon and Walmart.com as Apple seeks to become yet another huge global Subscription Behemoth or in plainer English….a Rent Seeker.
2: NoSQL type Graph Databases are almost all vector oriented which speeds up queries about the relationships between different data objects stored in the system. This makes Graph Databases ideal for Machine Learning and AI use cases as they excel in teasing out hidden data points and relationships in large unstructured data pools.
So Apple’s purchase of Kuzu also helps them with this point as well as Apple transitions into the world of AI and becoming an AI driven company.
3: Because Kuzu was intended to be an embedded database technology I can see Apple using Kuzu not only for internal company use cases but embedding Kuzu into many if not all of Apple’s consumer apps. Even Safari as one of Kuzu’s use cases was to embed its search capabilities into browsers via the WASM language and framework.
Here is some boilerplate from the Kuzu GitHub site highlighting some of its features and unique attributes.
“ Kuzu is an embedded graph database built for query speed and scalability. Kuzu is optimized for handling complex analytical workloads on very large databases and provides a set of retrieval features, such as a full text search and vector indices. Our core feature set includes:
- Flexible Property Graph Data Model and Cypher query language
- Embeddable, serverless integration into applications
- Native full text search and vector index
- Columnar disk-based storage
- Columnar sparse row-based (CSR) adjacency list/join indices
- Vectorized and factorized query processor
- Novel and very fast join algorithms
- Multi-core query parallelism
- Serializable ACID transactions
- Wasm (WebAssembly) bindings for fast, secure execution in the browser “
