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Neo4j raises $325M series F

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Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#11

Post by caturopath »

whalesalad wrote: post #5

> Series F Yikes > largest investment in a private database company I guess this is one of those PR moves that is trying to make something lame sound good? If your customer portfolio includes Walmart, Volvo and AstraZeneca why are you raising money a 6th time?

Having some department at e.g. Volvo using your product doesn't mean that you have Volvo as a serious customer paying you like they would as a serious customer.

I take your point that this is a really late round of funding, but this doesn't mean they've caught on like they want to yet.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#12

Post by Grimm1 »

What this tells me is that the graph db space has a lot of room in it for someone to come along and make a kick ass product, because honestly every time I've had a problem a graph db can solve I remember I basically only have a few mediocre choices to choose from.

Neo4J has been very meh in my experience, but they are the biggest.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#13

Post by economusty »

oauea wrote: post #10
handrous wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I'm sure it's fast, but also consumes a ridiculous amount of memory. Tried loading a smallish dataset into neo4j that runs on a 100mb ram postgres server just fine. Neo4j wanted gigabytes of memory.

Gotta love the jvm.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#14

Post by handrous »

oauea wrote: post #10
handrous wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I'm sure it's fast, but also consumes a ridiculous amount of memory. Tried loading a smallish dataset into neo4j that runs on a 100mb ram postgres server just fine. Neo4j wanted gigabytes of memory.

When I used it, it was fast at a very specific set of graph traversal operations. It was extremely easy to step outside those narrow patterns, while doing things that seemed like they should be fine and were very common sorts of things one might want to do with the DB, at which point performance would become terrible. A look at the underlying data structures they use was revealing re: why they were so fast at some things, and so slow at others. And they only achieved that much performance by, as you note, eating memory like it's free (I mean, it is Java...).

It was also alarmingly weak on data-integrity protection features, like constraints, locking, and data-types, at the time. IDK, maybe they've fixed that. Then, it was IMO wholly unsuited to hosting any data set that you couldn't stand to have completely destroyed every so often (so, a very particular kind of caching, which IIRC is exactly what one of their marketing department's favorite names to trot out, Ebay, used it for then).

[EDIT] I would, however, agree with nisa's post elsewhere in the thread, that the Cypher query language is excellent.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#15

Post by [deleted] »

oauea wrote: post #10
handrous wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I'm sure it's fast, but also consumes a ridiculous amount of memory. Tried loading a smallish dataset into neo4j that runs on a 100mb ram postgres server just fine. Neo4j wanted gigabytes of memory.

[deleted]

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#16

Post by detaro »

oauea wrote: post #10
handrous wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I'm sure it's fast, but also consumes a ridiculous amount of memory. Tried loading a smallish dataset into neo4j that runs on a 100mb ram postgres server just fine. Neo4j wanted gigabytes of memory.

Did you do anything to configure that? If I remember correctly (has been a few years), Neo4j will be default reserve a bunch of space for caches and such (on top of default reserved heap sizes etc for Java). As such, the defaults don't necessarily say much.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#17

Post by chippiewill »

handrous wrote: post #3
mkr-hn wrote: post #2

It's always interesting to hear about huge funding rounds for companies I've never heard of. Even more so when they apparently work with a bunch of companies I have heard of.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I used to work for a database vendor. I'm getting serious 'nam style flashbacks reading your comment.

The capability of sales to sell a product to massive companies for a use case that we're actually not very good at was unbelievable.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#18

Post by The_rationalist »

Grimm1 wrote: post #12

What this tells me is that the graph db space has a lot of room in it for someone to come along and make a kick ass product, because honestly every time I've had a problem a graph db can solve I remember I basically only have a few mediocre choices to choose from. Neo4J has been very meh in my experience, but they are the biggest.

What make you consider Tinkerpop mediocre?

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#19

Post by whalesalad »

caturopath wrote: post #11
whalesalad wrote: post #5

> Series F Yikes > largest investment in a private database company I guess this is one of those PR moves that is trying to make something lame sound good? If your customer portfolio includes Walmart, Volvo and AstraZeneca why are you raising money a 6th time?

Having some department at e.g. Volvo using your product doesn't mean that you have Volvo as a serious customer paying you like they would as a serious customer. I take your point that this is a really late round of funding, but this doesn't mean they've caught on like they want to yet.

I agree that what you've described is likely the true situation. It just looks funny to see a company claim to be worth $2 billion dollars and namedrop big brands and yet require a 6th cash injection. There is an incongruence there.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#20

Post by handrous »

chippiewill wrote: post #17
handrous wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I used to work for a database vendor. I'm getting serious 'nam style flashbacks reading your comment. The capability of sales to sell a product to massive companies for a use case that we're actually not very good at was unbelievable.

It keeps working, so I can't hardly blame companies for doing it. The people who are falling for it, on the other hand....
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