Neo4j 4.0: Scale with No Limits and No Surprises
Scale Your Applications Like Never Before
Scale Your Applications Like Never Before
Data grows relentlessly and performant applications can’t be constrained by data volumes. However, relational and NoSQL databases are restrained by data volume restrictions.
Applications need to scale up and out to handle higher volumes, while also maintaining performance across a growing diversity of on-premises, hybrid and cloud architectures.
Neo4j 4.0 helps organizations scale their mission-critical applications with a minutes-to-milliseconds performance advantage.
Sharding
Neo4j 4.0 now allows for sharding – a result of careful engineering (and at least one PhD in parallel computing) – which distributes and parallelizes queries and aggregations over multiple databases. Now you can combine your business world together conveniently while never corrupting your data.
As a developer, with Neo4j 4.0, you model and store graphs in individual Neo4j databases as you always have. The underlying technology certainly has a lot going on, but this technology is not complex to deploy or invasive to existing business systems. Simply plug existing business systems in and Neo4j 4.0 does the aggregation work for you.
With sharding, we're taking the difficulty of achieving this level of scale away from you, which minimizes costs and hardware, while maximizing performance across connected datasets.
Sharding is possible because of new capabilities like federated queries.
Sharding
Neo4j 4.0 allows organizations to distribute their large graph datasets into the smaller physical database via sharding. The physical storage of such a graph is divided, or sharded, across many servers or clusters, despite the fact that it's still a single graph dataset. Some reasons to shard a graph:
- Isolate data for compliance with laws like GDPR
- Minimize latency by storing segments close to users
- Break up very large graphs (tens of billions of nodes)
Dividing the graph database across many servers is key to scalability. Sharding supports such use cases as compliance with complex, ever-changing data privacy regulations.
Federation
While sharding divides graphs, federation enables queries across disjointed graphs by bringing multiple graphs together.
Imagine having graphs across your organization, from IT to finances, operations, sales, HR, marketing, manufacturing and more. Neo4j 4.0 leverages the power of Cypher, allowing developers to query across these smaller graphs – even ones with different schemas – as if it was one large graph.
The result: All data stored across an enterprise's graph database ecosystem are now searchable with a single Cypher query – an entirely new and powerful capability for the graph database world.
Resources
Featured Content
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The modern application development process puts a premium on velocity, which is why ease-of-use and flexibility for developers have become as critical as performance for database platforms. One of the ways this is achieved is by avoiding the need for cumbersome data abstractions to translate between business needs and relational schemas. Graph databases are a canonical example of this, and Neo4j remains one of the pioneers of the category committed to bringing the benefits of graphs to a wide variety of customer types and use cases.”Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst at RedMonk -
The unmatched scalability of Neo4j 4.0 lends itself to emerging AI and machine learning use cases, which require graphs to scale reliably across massive datasets to give learning applications context and to make AI more explainable. In addition, the ability to apply fine-grained security on nodes and relationships in a flexible way will have immediate impact across a broad range of use cases.”Michal Bachman, CEO of GraphAware
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At albelli, we regularly deal with petabytes of data, and we are most excited about the new scalability features in Neo4j 4.0. The ability to horizontally scale with the new sharding and federation features, alongside Neo4j’s optimal scale-up architecture, enables us to grow our graph database without barriers. Neo4j factored our requirements into their latest release — a mark of a great vendor and a graph database designed for the future.”Josh Marcus, Chief Technology Officer at albelli
