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I spent many years working on a Neo4j Ruby gem and really grew to love Cypher, their query language. I always found it phenomenally expressive, one of those thi

I spent many years working on a Neo4j Ruby gem and really grew to love Cypher, their query language. I always found it phenomenally expressive, one of those things that seems simple (almost trivial) at first but was extremely flexible and powerful when you needed more from it. It's highly readable, easy to teach, and intuitive in a way that I never found SQL to be. It's been years since I've worked with the product and while I don't miss Neo4j, I do miss the query language. It's a little unclear to me how GQL will incorporate Cypher but I hope the initiative is successful if for no other reason than a selfish one: I'd love Cypher to be around if I ever wind up using a GraphDB again.

vosper 7y ago
> It's been years since I've worked with the product and while I don't miss Neo4j, I do miss the query language Would you mind expanding on what you don't miss about Neo4j?
- sickcodebruh 7y ago
  I was trying to use it instead of Postgres as a general database and it just didn't shine in that role. The value proposition made sense on paper: it's a more natural way to reason about data than RDBMS, relationships as first-class citizens offer some really great benefits, avoiding the schema seems reasonable when the rest of your stack is dynamic, Cypher is more pleasant than SQL. While some of that might be true, I encountered the following: - Using a somewhat esoteric database increased my devops responsibilities. - Open source license didn't allow hot backups. - Ruby is just slow. I was using it before the binary protocol was implemented so performance was often lousy compared to Postgres. - Writes were slow. Neo4j seemed to excel at reads and, in particular, the kinds of reads that are best handled by a graph. Shocking, I know. - I really didn't have enough data or the need for the kinds of queries that would really let it shine. - A big part of the culture at meetups and tutorials was based on "DON'T YOU JUST HATE JOINS!?" It felt culty. I was a big part of that problem for a long time. The last meetup I went to just felt like people bashing Postgres. So I think that a lot of the things that I don't miss are because I wasn't right for it, I should have just been using Postgres. All that said, there was so much about it to love. Cypher, as already mentioned. While the culture at meetups might have kind of relied on bashing SQL and RDBMS, the company itself was full of brilliant, generous, creative, wonderful people. Their CEO (Emil) in particular is a total sweetheart. The organization was extremely supportive of open source projects, very inclusive, very eager to get people involved, and it made a big impact on me. So, again, while Postgres is the tool I always reach for first, I think that Neo4j as an organization does great work and as a product has a lot to offer if you're the right fit for it. I'm glad to see they're doing well.
simplify 7y ago
I've built an app using Neo4j and have the same impression. Cypher is such a good query language. I wish I could use it over SQL in pretty much every situation.

vosper 7y ago

> It's been years since I've worked with the product and while I don't miss Neo4j, I do miss the query language Would you mind expanding on what you don't miss about Neo4j?

sickcodebruh 7y ago
I was trying to use it instead of Postgres as a general database and it just didn't shine in that role. The value proposition made sense on paper: it's a more natural way to reason about data than RDBMS, relationships as first-class citizens offer some really great benefits, avoiding the schema seems reasonable when the rest of your stack is dynamic, Cypher is more pleasant than SQL. While some of that might be true, I encountered the following: - Using a somewhat esoteric database increased my devops responsibilities. - Open source license didn't allow hot backups. - Ruby is just slow. I was using it before the binary protocol was implemented so performance was often lousy compared to Postgres. - Writes were slow. Neo4j seemed to excel at reads and, in particular, the kinds of reads that are best handled by a graph. Shocking, I know. - I really didn't have enough data or the need for the kinds of queries that would really let it shine. - A big part of the culture at meetups and tutorials was based on "DON'T YOU JUST HATE JOINS!?" It felt culty. I was a big part of that problem for a long time. The last meetup I went to just felt like people bashing Postgres. So I think that a lot of the things that I don't miss are because I wasn't right for it, I should have just been using Postgres. All that said, there was so much about it to love. Cypher, as already mentioned. While the culture at meetups might have kind of relied on bashing SQL and RDBMS, the company itself was full of brilliant, generous, creative, wonderful people. Their CEO (Emil) in particular is a total sweetheart. The organization was extremely supportive of open source projects, very inclusive, very eager to get people involved, and it made a big impact on me. So, again, while Postgres is the tool I always reach for first, I think that Neo4j as an organization does great work and as a product has a lot to offer if you're the right fit for it. I'm glad to see they're doing well.

simplify 7y ago

I've built an app using Neo4j and have the same impression. Cypher is such a good query language. I wish I could use it over SQL in pretty much every situation.