

Neo Technology Raise $2.4M To Commercialize neo4j Graph Database - nikcub
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/10/27/neo-technology-commercializes-next-generation-graph-based-database/

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iamelgringo
I've recently looking around at possible back ends for a recommendation engine
for my social news site. I've been interested in using neo4j for a while, but
I was concerned about dual licensing and the costs. I'm bootstrapping, and my
budget is pretty limited. So, I emailed neo and asked for a quote.

To make a long story short, Peter Neubauer from Neo called me, and we had a
really great conversation for about 20-30 minutes. He took the time to forward
some papers to me about using graphs in recommendations engines.

Their subscription prices were crazy reasonable. I was expecting Oracle
pricing. I was actually suprised their prices were so low. Up to a million
primitives are free. Up to 10million primitives is $49 a month.

I'm really glad to hear they got funding. So far, I've been really impressed
by them. I'm looking forward to checking out their database.

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simonw
I looked in to neo4j the other day, but was put off by the combination of the
AGPL license (which, as I understand it, makes it impossible to use for any
commercial purpose since you are required to GPL any software that so much as
talks to the database) and a lack of any indication of how much a commercial
license would cost on the web site. I know this is how "enterprise" stuff
works, but personally I have a strong aversion to evaluating software when I
have no idea how much it would cost should I chose to use it - that's one of
the reasons I like open source.

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cschwarm
You may like to have a look at 4store: <http://4store.org/> \-- it's GPL3.

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andr
I'm trying to see how a graph database would be significantly faster than a
key-value database. The only thing that comes to mind is that with graph
databases a node's edges contain direct pointers or offsets to the other
nodes, instead of containing the "public" string key of every other node,
which has to be looked up via the B-tree index. This conclusion is supported
by [http://blog.directededge.com/2009/02/27/on-building-a-
stupid...](http://blog.directededge.com/2009/02/27/on-building-a-stupidly-
fast-graph-database/)

So if key-value stores gave us access to their internal record IDs or offsets,
both to read and search by, we would see a considerable improvement. The trade
off would be sticking to an append-only data structure without compaction, or
doing some extra work to update the offsets on every compaction.

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nl
Rickard Öberg speaks highly of it, which generally speaking is a pretty good
endorsement.

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dacort
Great news for Neo. Most of the comments I see about neo4j are along the lines
of "great technology, but doesn't quite cut it from a performance
perspective".

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Shooter
I've seen some of the same comments, but I tend to take them with a grain of
salt...in part because none of the commenters seem to have asked Neo or the
community for help/advice when they've experienced performance issues. (The
fact that the Neo demos I've seen have been pretty decent performance-wise
leads me to believe _at least some_ of the performance issues could have been
solved if the people trying Neo out would have simply asked for help. It's
usually difficult to wring the best performance out of a database of any kind
without some hard-earned experience. The fact that many of the experimenters
probably have little graphDB experience in general couldn't have helped the
situation any.)

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peterneubauer2
Definitely true. There are of course patterns that can slow certain graph
traversals down, like having millions of relationships on one single node.
Otherwise Neo4j handles up to a couple of billions of
nodes/relationships/primitives out of the box, which is a good starting point
for most of the cases.

Disclaimer: I am part of the Neo4j team.

~~~
dacort
And it's that former situation where I've seen the performance issues
mentioned.

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coliveira
Does anybody know how this compares to Allegro Graph (in price and/or
performance)?

