With representatives in all five continents, the Viadeo Group offers network development solutions and business opportunities at both a local and global level to over 35 million professionals.

Industry: Professional Network Use Case:  Social Graph
Viadeo is Europe’s #1 professional social network, and LinkedIn’s main competitor. With an international presence throughout the world, Viadeo relies on simple, and high performance technology to provide professional connections to over 35 million members worldwide.

Success with Neo4j

Viadeo, integrated Neo4j as their backend database, to store all of their users and relationships. When their network expanded to a level that their traditional MySQL database couldn’t handle, Viadeo experienced performance and storage issues that would not perform at the rate the company was growing. It was at this time that Christophe Thibault, CTO, decided to implement Neo4j to store Viadeo’s data. Thibault chose Neo4j for its performance, ease of use, and its ability to quickly integrate with other applications. Thibault and his development team found, through the POC (proof-of-concept), Neo4j was easy to learn when other NOSQL databases were more complex, and difficult to integrate. With Neo4j, it took about five minutes time to get started. Integrating Neo4j, Viadeo has highly accelerated their system in two ways. Neo4j increased Viadeo’s performance by requiring less storage space and less time to restructure the graph.

Before Neo4j

After Neo4j

Graph Storage 300 GB 3 GB
Time to Recreate Graph 48 Hours 44 min
In only two months, Viadeo successfully transitioned all of their user data from a MySQL database to Neo4j. Viadeo went with Neo4j for its simplicity and high performance, and as a result they have far less storage restrictions and faster querying times.
“Our quick growth forced us to always be up-to-date with brand new technologies.  We evaluated all of the NoSQL databases, and chose Neo4j as our graph database for its performance and the simplicity of the solution.”
 

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