Neo4j wins Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source big data tools third year in a row!
Neo4j is a NoSQL database with an almost organic feel. It’s a graph database, so it doesn’t see the world as documents or as rows and columns, but as connected objects — nodes connected by relationships, in Neo4j’s language. Nodes can represent people or restaurants or cities or stellar objects. Relationships can be “knows” or “has eaten at” or “lives in” or “is X light years from.”
The community edition gives you everything you need to run an embedded version, or a client-server system. Drivers exist for nearly every language you can think of, but if you want to manipulate the database at a higher level, you can use Cypher, Neo4j’s equivalent to SQL. The Neo4j website’s interactive documentation is some of the best we’ve seen. Even if the concepts are new, you’ll have no problem getting up to speed with this exceptional graph database.
Keywords: Bossie Award • Infoworld