Overview of Neo4j Administration

Some applications use Neo4j out-of-the-box, and others extend it with additional functionality from libraries that provide specialized procedures. Examples of these libraries include:

Regardless of which library your application requires, you must ensure that Neo4j is configured to know how to access these libraries.

Your application will include at least one Neo4j database, but it could include multiple databases, each with their own Neo4j instance. A Neo4j instance can only support one active database.

Many deployed applications use Causal Clustering which you will learn about later in this training. Causal Clustering is an architecture which provides data safety and performance for critical systems that could be distributed all over the world.

Some applications are developed using data that is stored in a single graph. They can be developed using any language for which there is a driver that can connect to Neo4j.

Each application (Neo4j client) communicates with Neo4j to access the graph using the Bolt or HTTP protocol. Neo4j-supported and some community drivers use the Bolt protocol. The clients can be JVMs, .NET resources, a Web server, all of which can be accessed by an end-user.

As a Neo4j database administrator, you are responsible for the availability and consistency of the Neo4j database.

Neo4j is often used in combination with other data sources (polyglot persistence), such as relational or NoSQL databases. Data can be fetched from the different systems in order to be manipulated by an application and subsequently written back to Neo4j. Other solutions can involve loading of data from a number of databases into Neo4j in order to efficiently do connected data analysis on the combined data set.

With cloud-hosted microservices, the implementation chosen for the microservice is one that performs best for the type of transaction. In a cloud-based microservice architecture, there may be a number of services that Neo4j can provide to the end-users.

As a Neo4j database administrator, you are responsible for the availability and consistency of the Neo4j database, and for making the data accessible by applications. Application developers are responsible for the logic in transferring and manipulating data between the databases.

Causal Clustering is used in production environments where high throughput, continuous availability, and reliability are important factors. This feature is available with Neo4j Enterprise Edition.

With Causal Clusters, you configure multiple Neo4j instances that communicate with each other about updates to the database. Causal Clusters are used when data needs to reside in multiple physical locations, or if you want to implement a high availability architecture where access to data will not be affected if a Neo4j instance goes down.

A common use for Neo4j is when different data is required in a set of geographic locations. For example, an online retailer may have different data in the US and Europe. Some data could be shared between different geographically located data centers, but the most heavily updated data needs to physically reside closer to the end-user applications. Neo4j Causal Clusters can be configured to span geographic locations.

As a Neo4j database administrator, you will be responsible for configuring and monitoring Causal Clusters. You will work with architects to determine the appropriate configuration of the Causal Cluster, taking into account aspects such as: uptime requirements, performance requirements, and redundancy required in order to handle events of Neo4j instance failure or data center failure.

Some decisions you may need to make are:

We will cover the configuration, management and monitoring of Causal Clusters in depth later in this training.

A common use case for Neo4j is for data scientists analyze complex patterns in connected data. Neo4j Bloom, or some other data visualization tool, may be used as the front-end. The following are two common patterns this use case:

Some enterprises need to consolidate large amounts of data for analysis. The data can come from data lakes, NoSQL databases, document stores, relational, all of which is analyzed and placed into a Neo4j database for analytics. A common architecture for streaming and analyzing data for consolidations is Apache Spark.

As a Neo4j database administrator, you will work with architects to ensure that the Neo4j database in this type of environment is properly configured and available to the computational engines that will write to the graph.

The Community Edition is a full functioning version of Neo4j suitable for single instance deployments. It has full support for key Neo4j features, such as ACID compliance, Cypher, and access via the binary protocol and HTTP APIs. It is ideal for smaller internal or do-it-yourself projects that do not require high levels of scaling or professional services and support. The Community Edition is free to download and use and is available from the Neo4j download page or from the Neo4j GitHub repository.

The Enterprise Edition extends the functionality of the Community Edition to include key features for performance and scalability such as a clustering architecture for high availability and online backup functionality. It is the right choice for production systems with availability requirements or needs for scaling up or out. Enterprise Edition requires a license from Neo4j. You can download Neo4j Enterprise Edition from the Neo4j download page. When you install Neo4j Enterprise Enterprise, you have a 30 day evaluation license.

This is the most common deployment, and it is recommended for all onsite deployments that do not require embedded mode. In this architecture, Neo4j runs as a database server and can be accessed through binary and http APIs for data querying and updating.

This architecture is more common in OEM setups, where Neo4j runs integrated as part of a third party product. When Neo4j is embedded directly into an application, you get all the functionality of the database directly accessible through the Java APIs used by the application code. This makes it very easy to directly work with the database and get lightning fast performance.

Neo4j has been successfully hosted in these environments:

To learn more about Neo4j Cloud deployments see the Developer Guide to Cloud Deployment that is updated regularly.