Neo4j database research

Question

I recently started researching database features of databases. At the moment I'm looking into Neo4j Graph database.

Unfortunately, I can't find every bit of information I need. I found most information except the following:

• Supporting datatypes? (Integer,
• Max. database size?
• Max. nodes in db?
• Max. relations in db?

Institute

Answer 1

The supported datatypes:

• boolean or boolean[]
• byte or byte[]
• short or short[]
• int or int[]
• long or long[]
• float or float[]
• double or double[]
• char or char[]
• java.lang.String or String[]

Source: Neo4j API docs

There's no limit on database size, but the current release (1.2) has limitations on the number of nodes, relationships and properties. The limit on each of these is 4 billion. The work on increasing the limits is done right now, and will be included in a milestone release soon. The new limit is 32B on nodes and relationships and 64B on properties.

In the 1.3.M03 milestone release support for a more efficient way of storing short strings was included, which will lower disk consumption considerably for many datasets. See Better support for short strings in Neo4j.

Leverhulme

thx for your amazingly fast answer! Really helpful. If anybody want's to know the source of the 'increasing the limits..' part, there's a blog post about it: blog.neo4j.org/2011_01_01_archive.html – Institute

Answer 2

Here are some key differences and distinguishing features:

Neo4j has data types not found in a relational system: path, list. Traversals are along paths during which data can be collected.

Relationships can have properties unlike the joins in a relational system. They can be leverage to document provenance and speed queries.

Increasing the number f nodes and relationships has a minimal effect on performance.

It's easy to augment a graph with another graph or ny memorializing the results of analytics/queries in new nodes, relationships or properties ... which is how you incrementally build a knowledge graph.

Vaccinia