Neo4j raises $325M series F • Hacker News Board

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#51

Post by handrous » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

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?)

Neo4j is all-in on, "almost everything looks like (or can be made to look like) a graph, so almost everyone should be using a graph database".

As for those specific figures, I'm guessing there's enough wiggle room in "data and analytics innovations" (emphasis mine) to find or project almost any trend one wishes. What are data analytics innovations? Why, it's the set of things that will see 80% use of graph technologies! "Graph technologies" is also so potentially-vague that it could plausibly be 100% of almost anything related to software.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#52

Post by logicx24 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

distrill wrote: post #38

not_jd_salinger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any of them figured out how to generate a profit or have they just switched from extracting money from VCs to extracting it from the public?

Is profit not normally extracted from the public? Rideshare costs are definitely increasing as they move towards profitability, this seems to be the expected and reasonable path towards that.

Similarly, Airbnb has been profitable for a while. Snowflake is also moving towards that.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#53

Post by handrous » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

feu wrote: post #36

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.

Do you have any opinions on ArangoDB or Dgraph? My new tech lead is talking about switching from MongoDB to one of those.

> My new tech lead is talking about switching from MongoDB to one of those.

File under, "not sure if a very good joke, or serious".

I'm leaning toward the former. "New tech lead" is the give-away (or is it?).

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#54

Post by speaktorob » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

somewhereoutth wrote: post #48

Graph DBs work if you know your relationships of interest ahead of time, and are happy to have them baked into your dataset. With relational databases, you can join on anything anywhen, so you can explore new relationships as you go.

That's exactly the trade off, isn't it? Either you do the work to store the relationships and save on the compute and memory cost later, or you pay as you go to build it in real time with a relational database. It's horses for courses.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#55

Post by aserafini » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #45

nick_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked out RedisGraph extension for Redis?

Redis is memory-backed, so you have limitations here. When I think of neo4j and its equivalents, it's about super giant datasets that are beyond memory limits.

Redis also supports ‘Redis on Flash’ (use SSDs to augment RAM), but it is part of their Enterprise product.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#56

Post by hugofirth » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

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/)

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#57

Post by speaktorob » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

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.

I don't think you're actually supposed to use CE in a production environment, it's more there for learning and teaching, which is why it's free. If you want production grade then use the cloud offering.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#58

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

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?)

Historically, graph databases did a passable job of supporting data models and queries that were not really possible in SQL (absent proprietary, vendor-specific extensions). That's all over now, because recent versions of SQL support recursive queries that can handle general graphs quite easily. No real need for a specialized solution, even plain vanilla Postgres is good to go.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#59

Post by dkarras » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

handrous wrote: post #53

feu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any opinions on ArangoDB or Dgraph? My new tech lead is talking about switching from MongoDB to one of those.

> My new tech lead is talking about switching from MongoDB to one of those. File under, "not sure if a very good joke, or serious". I'm leaning toward the former. "New tech lead" is the give-away (or is it?).

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

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#60

Post by jrsj » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

not_jd_salinger wrote: post #32

httpz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Series F by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing anymore. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Snowflake all had Series F rounds at one point.

Have any of them figured out how to generate a profit or have they just switched from extracting money from VCs to extracting it from the public?

The ability to generate a profit and investment rounds aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you’re focused on growth you’re not going to have profits because you’re going to be spending all of your money on growing. That doesn’t necessarily mean you couldn’t drastically reduce expenditures and become profitable if investment wasn’t an option (or just an unfavorable option)