Cypher JDBC Tools Testing Results

After publishing the call for helping us testing the Neo4j JDBC driver in the wild two weeks ago. Ralf Becher from TIQView stepped up and tested a LOT of JDBC tools with the driver. Thanks a lot for this engagement Ralf! Luanne Coutinho, the winner of our Heroku Contest and Michael Wilmes also took up the challenge of testing the JDBC-driver with real-world tools. Thank you! I had some fun but not so much success testing some command line JDBC clients with the driver. The complete list of tests is in the published google spreadsheet. The following is a quite impressive list, feel free to add you favorite JDBC-tool to this list by following the instructions on our Call-To-Action post.

Eclipse BIRT

Works very well, you just need to point out the driver in the driver setup, and the edit the SQL queries in the DataSet view to be Cypher queries. I tested against a local Neo4j Server instance. Peter Neubauer

SQuirrel SQL v.3.3.0

All Cypher queries did work very well. Ralf Becher

Aqua Data Studio 4.7.2

(Download) Tested with normal read queries as well as delete queries. Works. No optional TYPE"/"HAS_PROPERTY" nodes in queried DB. Therefore no browsing of DB scheme possible. Application handles well. No error message. Tree structure of DB view just stays blank. Michael Wilmes

QlikView

Works well, detailed explanations and examples with queries, visualization and transformation in the blog post. Ralf Becher

Pentaho Kettle Dataintegration

Did work except RETURN of node or relationship causes an exception. Detailed explaination and example in the blog post. Ralf Becher

SQL Query Plugin for IntelliJ

Worked pretty well, was able to execute a couple of queries including mutating ones- this is really helpful. The schema browser was understandably not very interesting. Tried a couple of data exports- html, csv and xml- samples uploaded to dropbox. Do the autocommit settings in these tools apply? In case they do, I played around with them without much success. For the default=true, I created a node, and then queried it by ID- got a SQLException. Only if I explicitly commit does the node get returned. Then turned autocommit off, created a node- same thing- unable to query it till I commit. Also unable to update a property till I commit the create. After the commits, I updated a property, and rolled back (also tried disconnecting, killing IntelliJ)- but the update had been committed anyway. Luanne Link to screenshots and data files.

Ataccama DQ Analyzer

The Ataccama DQ Analyzer works well with Neo4j. It gives us the possibillity to do a data profiling on graph data, more details in the blog post. Ralf Becher

SQLExplorer

Works smoothly. Details and many screenshots in the blog post. Ralf Becher

DbVisualizer

Worked well (with a customer connection implementation for the database metadata). Rickard Öberg Link to Blog Post

LibreOffice

When it comes to using a database as a reporting tool, one of the simplest thing you can do is use one of the Office packages and connect to a database and use the data for charts and spreadsheets. Since LibreOffice has pretty good JDBC connectivity I tried it out, and here’s the result Rickard Öberg Link to Blog Post

ODBC in Windows

While having a JDBC driver is great, not all tools that work with databases use JDBC. Some use ODBC instead, and since there is a ODBC-JDBC Gateway available from Easysoft I wanted to try this out. After installing this software it was really easy to set up a connection, and then connect to it using a standard ODBC tool. Rickard Öberg Link to Blog Post

IntelliJ

Lastly I tried using the JDBC driver with IntelliJ, my Java IDE of choice. This worked out really well, and with some configuration it even allows me to enter values for parameterized queries, which is nice. Rickard Öberg Link to Blog Post

HenPlus

Didn’t work, got as far as registering the driver, but it seems to parse SQL so it didn’t execute the cypher statement and instead tried to load a file Michael Hunger

jisql

It did not work, it tries to parse the sql and so doesn’t execute cypher. Had to fix the broken start script first and even then it just hang in the prompt. Michael Hunger

SQL Workbench

Works very well, simple setup, easy to use. Michael Hunger

SQLShell (clapper)

First of all, it works! A commandline shell written in scala, hosted on github but with a graphical installer 🙂 I installed it to a local directory, added neo4j-jdbc.jar to the lib directory and set up the config file.

[drivers]
# Driver aliases.
neo4j = org.neo4j.jdbc.Driver

[db_neo4j] aliases: neo4j url: jdbc:neo4j://localhost:7474 driver: neo4j user: password: history: $vars.historyDir/neo4j.hist Then you start it with: sh bin/sqlshell -c config.cfg neo4j SQLShell, version 0.8.1 (2012/03/16 09:43:31) Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Brian M. Clapper Using JLine Type “”help”” for help. Type “”.about”” for more information. sqlshell> start n=node(0) return n Executing query: start n=node(0) return n with params{} Starting the internal [HTTP/1.1] client Execution time: 0.792 seconds Retrieval time: 0.1 seconds 1 row returned. n ———————– {_node_id=0, name=root} sqlshell> start n=node(*) return n limit 20 Executing query: start n=node(*) return n limit 20 with params{} Execution time: 0.770 seconds Retrieval time: 0.13 seconds 20 rows returned. The only drawback so far is that the tool destroys the terminal, so you have to do a “reset” afterwards. Michael Hunger