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Neo4j raises $325M series F

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Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#101

Post by junon »

softwaredoug wrote: post #40

> By 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the enterprise.” What is behind the thought that graph databases are going to grow so much in the next few years? To me they've always had a niche use... Are they really going to be ubiquitous (like this funding seems to assume?)

If a good enough engine comes along, I would agree with those speculations. Many times I've wished my SQL or Mongo databases had graph functionality.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#102

Post by xtracto »

handrous wrote: post #64
dkarras wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what is wrong with them? I've only had very good experience with ArangoDB.

New tech lead pushing switching an existing product from infamously-cargo-culted MongoDB, of the much-hyped-but-now-passed Document Databases Are The Future wave, to either of a couple products in the current "X database architecture is The Future" wave? Does that not read like it could just as well be straight-faced parody, as real? The products may be fine, so far as they go, that's not what I'm trying to puzzle ou…

In my experience MongoDB has only given me problems (either performance or data loss). Most likely when someone wants so "solve" something with MongoDB, there is always a better technology to do it (Cassandra, ScyllaDB, S3!, PostgreSQL/JSONB). I could Imagine that their current implementation has a half modeled graph-like structure in MongoDB and migrating to something else (I am generally against Neo4J because of their horrible pricing tiers).

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#104

Post by xtracto »

deckard1 wrote: post #68
handrous wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GraphQL has been such a bad name to deal with. I've seen so much "we need a graph, so isn't graphQL a good idea?" or "this is a graph database, so doing graphQL on it will be way easier & more natural than on a SQL db, right?". Even from technical and semi-technical people.

This always annoyed me more than it should. It's also torturing the definition of "query language." There is no equivalent of "join", or any other typical query feature such as aggregation, grouping, sorting, filtering. GraphQL has as much to do with graphs or query languages as my smart TV has to do with intelligence. It's RPC, but RPC fell out of fashion when SOAP/WSDL/XML died.

That's an interesting point. The beauty about SQL is that behind it, it has really good backed theory of Codd's Relational Algebra. Whereas Document Based, Column Based and GraphQL, don't have that. It would be interesting to see research on Graph theory as data sets and how to represent them as a formal query language. The majority of Graph theory I remember taking in my CS classes (granted, that was more than 15 years ago) was about graph traversal and path-finding.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#105

Post by busterarm »

mbreese wrote: post #72
dkarras wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what is wrong with them? I've only had very good experience with ArangoDB.

It's not about the databases, it's about the migration in the first place. If you have a problem that can be solved best with a graph database, then there is no problem. Many problem can be better solved with a graph structure. Choose one, and you'll be happy. But, if your use-case is migrating from MongoDB to a graph database, that's a bit of a red-flag. What data model do you have where you can migrate from a docum…

ArangoDB is multi-model though. It's not JUST a graph db.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#106

Post by busterarm »

hugofirth wrote: post #56
busterarm wrote: post #50

The Enterprise version is ridiculously expensive. Think Oracle/IBM type of pricing. Community Edition is hobbled to the point where I wouldn't recommend anyone run it in production.

Enterprise licenses for on premise Neo4j are certainly for a specific customers with specific needs, but there is always the DBaaS ( https://neo4j.com/cloud/aura/ ). Or if you absolutely need on premise and are small there is the startup program for free enterprise licenses ( https://neo4j.com/startups/ )

Neo4j's entire pricing model, even in cloud, is built around the idea that you'll have one centralized very large graph.

Many companies, like the one I'm at, have the opposite use case -- many, geo-distributed, tiny graphs and multiple (read: 3-5) pre-prod environments. They simply don't have a pricing model that supports customers like us.

They wanted to charge us something like 10% of our ARR for something that was just a component of one microservice.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#108

Post by topicseed »

motohagiography wrote: post #96

I've done development on an app with Neo as the back end, and what I liked about it was mainly py2neo and the cypher query language. Even after developing in it, approaching another graph in DGraph was conceptually impenetrable, as my impression of dgraph was they had a bunch of unnecessary and poor abstractions in their documentation. The next candidate is the redis graph, but I haven't. With Neo, if you learn cyphe…

Amongst all graph databases I tried, Neo would land third and last. Dgraph and ArangoDB would definitely be ahead in terms of developer experience from data loading to regular transactional use.

But I do appreciate all the effort Neo4j put for years in educating us all on graph databases, use cases, and just drawing attention and awareness.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#109

Post by clpm4j »

__jem wrote: post #99
clpm4j wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native graph storage and index-free adjacency. No tables, no JOINs.

Okay,that seems more interesting. Any resources on the data structures used to avoid indices? Without table ddl, if node types are arbitrary, that seems like a hard problem to solve in terms of storage layout.

"To understand why native graph technology is so efficient, we step back in time a little to 2010 and the coining of the term index-free adjacency by Rodriguez and Neubauer. The great thing about index-free adjacency is that your graphs are (mostly) self-indexing. Given a node, the next nodes you may want to visit are implicit based on the relationships connecting it. It’s a sort of local index, which allows us to cheaply traverse the graph (very cheaply, at cost O(1) per hop).

Neo4j manages to keep traversal costs so low (algorithmically and mechanically) by implementing traversals as pointer chasing. This implementation option is available to us precisely because we bear the cost of building the storage engine..."[1]

"Each node (entity or attribute) in the graph database model directly and physically contains a list of relationship records that represent the relationships to other nodes. These relationship records are organized by type and direction and may hold additional attributes. Whenever you run the equivalent of a JOIN operation, the graph database uses this list, directly accessing the connected nodes and eliminating the need for expensive search-and-match computations."[2]

Resources if you're curious: [1] https://neo4j.com/blog/computer-hardware-native-graph-databa... [2] https://neo4j.com/developer/graph-db-vs-rdbms/

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#110

Post by staticassertion »

hirako2000 wrote: post #91
staticassertion wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, on the one hand it's a late round. On the other, as a CEO, the ability to just immediately raise 325 million dollars is both impressive and appealing. It's insane how far even one million dollars goes, 325 is mind boggling to me.

325M isn't all that much when the company has been growing for over 10 years, doubling its staff count every 2 years, with a bunch of VPs added in, supposedly to figure out how to run professionally 100 nerds. It leads to 4 layers made of directors, senior managers and managers below each VP. Those jobs take a decent pay, and a significant cash bonus. Significant travel and other expense coming from sales folks who w…

325M is a shitload of money. I'm not making a judgment on if it's "enough" or a good sign or whatever. I'm just saying it's an insane amount of money.
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