by jexp on 11/1/18, 11:08 AM with 93 comments
by motohagiography on 11/1/18, 12:41 PM
The reason I use a graph is for consistency from my product level business logic to my implementation.
Basically, to solve my problem, I started with a set of english statements, which yielded a grammar, that I described as "objects and morphisms," (things and relationships) then implemented it in a graph - put a front end on it and built a product.
Graphs provide coherence to my problem. Could an RDBMS do this? Yes, but not without a complex intermediate query layer. I think of using a graph as analogous to specifying your problem in terms of a functional language instead of imperatively. The reason to do that is because your product is the result of maintaining consistency of an abstraction, like a DSL or a game, instead of just retrieving stored values, documents and their variations.
It's disruptive to a lot of orgs as well, since there is a lot of sunk cost in RDBMS experience, so I think the applications are all net new projects. I don't foresee anyone migrating to one, but I do see a point where majority of new products use one.
by drej on 11/1/18, 12:29 PM
Granted, they won't let you do nearly as much as some advanced graph algorithms, but the ease with which you can use it in your operational data store is amazing. And with proper indexing, I could do a traversal in hundreds of milliseconds.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/queries-with....
by hardwaresofton on 11/1/18, 11:27 AM
I feel like 90% of the applications in existence can go so far with a regular RDBMS that they never try out Neo4j... I know that's the case with me. Half the time I think I'd just try throwing Agensgraph[0] at the problem instead of jumping to the community version of Neo4J.
by lmeyerov on 11/1/18, 3:56 PM
This may help non-graph folks understand the community a bit. Neo4j has a bunch of cool bits, and it's been a pleasure watching them bring two specific "aha!" moments to customers. Our tech helps teams build scalable visual workflows that include visual graph, so we're often brought in near the beginning of a graph project, and have repeatedly seen two situations where a DB at Neo4j's quality shines:
1. Performance: A teams starts using their existing data stores -- SQL, Splunk, etc. They'll get quite far. Often, however, they will hit some query that just cannot perform. E.g., for two bank accounts, all paths between them. For different DBs and workloads, these can be different things.
2. Ease: Asking for something like a 360 view around a device, user, patient, account, etc. is hard in sQL - you don't know what column, table, etc. to look at. Or imagine the above shortest-paths query. Cypher makes writing this stuff EASY, so in a world where a lot of people can barely do SQL, that's a superpower.
Neo4j has been broadening by entering the scaleout world, app dev world, and adding multi-modal & ML capabilities, which are all important things and help grow the eco-system. Congrats again!
by frant-hartm on 11/1/18, 12:48 PM
What we are seeing here is the 'commodification' of graph, a trend that happens in technology in general. Companies that launched ten years ago, on a massive investment with their own proprietary graph technology - I'm talking the likes of Twitter, Facebook and so on - today the same features could be implemented with a fraction of the investment. They'll do this by leveraging Neo4j.
This funding we'll broaden the reach of graph technology, while reducing the overall cost for individual organisations to adopt. Social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection systems are all now easily within reach. Check out our own free and open-source recommendation engine, which was built on top of Neo4j, for example: https://github.com/graphaware/neo4j-reco.
We live in exciting times. While the commodification of what we call 'graph 1.0' is in progress, what Tesla's head of A.I. Andrej Karpathy brands "Software 2.0", that is the intersection of machine learning and software development is rapidly picking up pace. We're only at the beginning of the hype cycle on this. And guess what? IT is an established fact, is that graph is playing a central role in this transformation process.
We are proud to say that our organisation is at the forefront of using graph technology to derive insight and meaning from unstructured data - we call this GraphAware Hume. We're really excited about this!
As you can see we're are pretty passionate about graph technology, and Neo4j in particular, and in our opinion we're at the beginning of what is going to be a very transformative adoption. If you're thinking about exploring how graph might fit into _your_ organisation, of course feel free to reach out.
Disclaimer: GraphAware (https://graphaware.com/) is Neo4j's solution partner
by ixf on 11/1/18, 11:27 AM
by dustingetz on 11/1/18, 1:06 PM
by cryptos on 11/1/18, 2:41 PM
And as far as I can remember from a former project the scalability is pretty limited (but this could have changed).
by mark_l_watson on 11/1/18, 11:35 AM
It is still a research thing, but I am starting to see occasional papers on inducing relations in graphs using deep learning. If this proves useful, that should help the growth of graph databases and the use of knowledge graphs.
However, as another commenter ‘hardwarsofton’ said, just using Postgres is very often all I need.
by ChicagoDave on 11/1/18, 12:15 PM
by perlin on 11/1/18, 2:59 PM
Our schema involved taking physical assets/personnel and representing them as different labels: machine, factory, production line, user, usergroup, etc. We then drew complex relationships between different user/groups in the organization and the assets they were responsible for.
At first, we used a relational database, but it soon became difficult to go more granular than simply: user belongs to usergroup, usergroup belongs to client, client has factories, factories have lines, lines have machines.
As many have pointed out here, it's not that you can't do this with non-graph databases, it just requires a more complex query layer. Neo4j allowed us to represent complex business relationships as natural language, and that really helped us as the business scaled.
by thebiglebrewski on 11/1/18, 6:52 PM
by mothsonasloth on 11/1/18, 1:00 PM
Java will always be king of enterprise despite all the drama with the future of the JRE.
by Nelkins on 11/1/18, 1:07 PM
by jarym on 11/1/18, 5:44 PM
I used to use OrientDB but moved away due to stability issues (long ago now so hopefully they have that sorted). I also just noticed they’ve been acquired by SAP!
For me graph layouts are conceptually superior vs relational when explaining to non techie users.
Practically however I now stick to Postgres - it’s ‘good enough’ (for what I’m doing) and has a heap of benefits in and of itself.
I looked st Agensgraph but I couldn’t get enough info on it, plus it is a custom version of Postgres (not a plug-in) and i think they recently switched to AGPL which makes it overall less exciting to investigate.
I know there are places where having a real graph db helps but I’ve not personally hit those scenarios yet.
by sandGorgon on 11/1/18, 2:53 PM
And there is a huge scalable graph stack with Cassandra - Datastax Enterprise Graph, Titan,JanusGraph (where Google is involved), Tinkerpop,etc.
The production readiness of neo4j is something I'm still not quite sure about.
It truly shines as an embedded graph db though. I wonder if there is a Blockchain story around neo4j (as a replacement for leveldb) that makes this more interesting. After all there is a lot of excitement around DAG based blockchain alternatives.
by fulafel on 11/1/18, 12:40 PM
by maximveksler on 11/1/18, 12:17 PM
I'm also interested in peopels opinions of Neptune in that domain.
Mostly for medical reasoning on RDF OWL ontologies such as "Ontology Development and Debugging in Protégé using the OntoDebug Plugin"[1]
by gizzlon on 11/1/18, 1:48 PM
One would think that Neo4j probably is the most stable one? But it's unclear to me if the full version is open source or not? [1][2]
Has anyone tried several?
Has anyone tried Dgraph? [3]
[1] Community is limited according to Wikipedia
[2] Trying to download enterprise takes me to a "Start a Free 30-Day Trial" page
[3] https://dgraph.io/ ?by krona on 11/1/18, 1:00 PM
by serialdev on 11/1/18, 12:03 PM