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Neo4j is so hostile to their open source "Community Edition" that I understand the sentiment that led to this. It's severely crippled, practically untunable an

Neo4j is so hostile to their open source "Community Edition" that I understand the sentiment that led to this. It's severely crippled, practically untunable and unmonitorable. You basically can't run it in a production context unless you're willing to take huge risks that it can shit the bed on you at any time and you're willing to rebuild from scratch. I'm in a position where I have to do this and I'd like to flip Neo4j the finger every single day.

JulianMorrison 6y ago
Can you switch to the fork?
- busterarm 6y ago
  No. That fork is significantly behind the current codebase and wouldn't work with the client driver we're currently using.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Sorry it is falling down for you. I find that Neo4J community edition is perfectly functional - as long as you don't need to scale to multiple servers, then you have to pay. re: untenable: can you give us some more details? JVM tuning? Neo4J specific? TBO, I use RDF datastores about 10x my use of Neo4J, but I appreciate their free edition. Another vendor who handles free vs. commercial well (in my opinion) is GraphDB, where the free edition is scalable to the largest single server you want to run it on, but only allows 2 simultaneous connections. Some un-solicited advice: if you really need to scale a large graph database, look at BlazeGraph that supports both property graphs and RDF. It is fast, injests data very quickly, and just a few servers run all of WikiData. That codebase became Amazon Neptune, BTW.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Not being able to have RBAC (or any users that aren't admin), not being able to use backup/restore, limited configuration of checkpoint windows, no query logging and no monitoring are all showstoppers for use in Production and completely gated behind an Enterprise license. I'm not saying it's not functional, because clearly it is, but it has no place in a corporate setting. I'm actually well aware of (much better) alternatives, but this tool was chosen by people in the org who gave no consideration to licensing, or requirements to run in production and are senior enough that there's no one to go around them to fix the situation.
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

JulianMorrison 6y ago

Can you switch to the fork?

busterarm 6y ago
No. That fork is significantly behind the current codebase and wouldn't work with the client driver we're currently using.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Sorry it is falling down for you. I find that Neo4J community edition is perfectly functional - as long as you don't need to scale to multiple servers, then you have to pay. re: untenable: can you give us some more details? JVM tuning? Neo4J specific? TBO, I use RDF datastores about 10x my use of Neo4J, but I appreciate their free edition. Another vendor who handles free vs. commercial well (in my opinion) is GraphDB, where the free edition is scalable to the largest single server you want to run it on, but only allows 2 simultaneous connections. Some un-solicited advice: if you really need to scale a large graph database, look at BlazeGraph that supports both property graphs and RDF. It is fast, injests data very quickly, and just a few servers run all of WikiData. That codebase became Amazon Neptune, BTW.

busterarm 6y ago
Not being able to have RBAC (or any users that aren't admin), not being able to use backup/restore, limited configuration of checkpoint windows, no query logging and no monitoring are all showstoppers for use in Production and completely gated behind an Enterprise license. I'm not saying it's not functional, because clearly it is, but it has no place in a corporate setting. I'm actually well aware of (much better) alternatives, but this tool was chosen by people in the org who gave no consideration to licensing, or requirements to run in production and are senior enough that there's no one to go around them to fix the situation.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.